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,1 ( I 



AMEEICAN LITERATURE 



BY 

ALPHONSO G. NEWCOMEE 

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE LELAND STANFORD 
JUNIOR UNIVERSITY 






CHICAGO 

SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 

1901 



t 






\'\ 



o\ 



I THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copita Received 

AUG. 31 1901 

Copyright entry 
CLASS-Q. XXc Nc*. 

cepf B, 



Copyright, 1901 

By 

SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 



• ♦ " t * •- 



PREFACE 



The method of teaching literature exclusively through a 
historical text-book has for many years been discredited. The 
substitution, however, of the study of a few selected "master- 
pieces" has also proved unsatisfactory, both because it leaves 
literature unrelated to history, and because it leaves the student 
without any sense of relations and proportion in literature 
itself. The remedy is sought in a compromise. None will at- 
tempt to teach literature to-day without requiring liberal read-, 
ing in the works of important writers ; but at the same time 
this reading will be regulated and the acquired knowledge set 
in order by the use of a critical history. 

Careful organization, therefore, should characterize every 
such history. There should be adequate recognition both of 
the various phases of literature and of individual writers. The 
selection of a few names, however truly representative, will 
not answer; and no writer may be presented in isolation from 
the rest. Doubtless, for the purpose of elementary study, in 
which memory plaj^s so great a part, some sharpness of outline 
is needed, and this calls for a partial detachment of authors. 
But relations must still be attended to, and proportion observed. 
The lesser men may be crowded down, but they should not be 
thrown out; they are needed to give the right perspective — to 
show that literature is not an affair of some half a dozen over- 
topping names, but that it is a wide activity, without definable 
metes and bounds. At the same time the wise teacher will 
avoid burdening his pupils' memories with the more colorless 
names and dates, which are to be seen rather than looked at, 

5 



6 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

like the minor features of a landscape that lie outside the 
focus of the eye. 

In the matter of critical estimates the writer of a text-book 
finds himself in a position of uncomfortable responsibility. 
Immature students, unused to judgment, and unable to test 
the opinions delivered to them, often take those opinions with- 
out question, like so much gospel. At first thought, the only 
safe course would seem to lie in rigidly following ' 'current esti- 
mates. " But it should be possible to preserve independence of 
judgment without giving way to personal vagary, and at the 
worst a little heresy may serve to stimulate the student's crit- 
ical faculty. After all, only time can determine where the 
heresy lies. Current criticism, for instance, tends perceptibly 
to depreciate our native literature. Possibly one who, like the 
writer of this book, has an honest admiration for our less 
academic writers, and ventures to set himself against this 
attitude, may find himself justified in the end. 

Of course, the writer of a text-book in this field owes much 
to certain standard critical works. For the early period the 
books of Professor Tyler, unhappily now concluded, are indis- 
pensable. For the later period Mr. Stedman's PoeAs of America 
is a natural guide, though Mr. Stedman has such an easy way 
of winning assent that one who values his own independence 
will use him charily. Professor Richardson's American Liter- 
ature is valuable for the whole field. Professor Wendell's 
Literary History of America has come too late to be of 
service to the present work, but it is included among the 
books of reference. All are commended to the student 
with the simple advice to make the usual allowance for per- 
sonal and local influences. Mr. Stedman, for instance, though 
he never fails to do justice to the Cambridge men, is disposed 
to make more of the New York poets — Baj^ard Taylor and 
others — than their merit seems to warrant; while on the other 



JPliEMOE 7 

hand Professor Wendell of Harvard, though certainly never 
prejudiced in praise of New England genius, treats with 
scant courtesy the Muses of the Crotonian fount. 

The list of late writers included in the appendix of this 
book is to be regarded chiefly as a directory. Upon many of 
these writers it is altogether too early to pass judgment, and 
many of the names have been admitted principally for the 
reason that they are likely to be sought for, or to make a more 
complete exhibition of the tendencies of a time or a locality. 
The somewhat full references and suggestions for study are in- 
tended for aids in the class room. 

Thanks are due to Mr. Lindsay T. Damon, of the Univer- 
sity of Chicago, for most helpful criticism both upon organization 
and upon details. Acknowledgment is also due to Messrs. 
D. Appleton and Co., of New York, the publishers of Bryant's 
works, and to Mr. David McKay, of Philadelphia, the publish. 
er of Brown's and Whitman's works, for permission to make 
extracts from books of which they hold the exclusive copy- 
right. 

Stanford University, Cal. A. G. N. 

May 18, 1901. 



CONTENTS. 



Preface .5 

Introduction 11 

PART I. BEGINNINaS 

From the Settlement of Virginia in 1607 to the 

End oe the Eighteenth Century 

I. The Colonial Period ....... 17 

History 19 

Poetry 22 

Theology ^ . . .25 

XL Transition. — Benjamin Franklin .... 32 

III. The Revolutionary Period 38 

Oratory and Political Prose 40 

Poetry ,42 

PART IT. THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 
From Maine to Georgia— 1800-1860 

IV. The New Environment 55 

Charles Brockden Brown 65 

Minor Early Fiction 61 

Washington Irving . , 64 

James Fenimore Cooper 77 

Early Poetry 93 

William Cullen Bryant 100 

V. Romance Ill 

Edgar Allan Poe 112 

From South'.to North 127 

Nathaniel Hawthorne 129 

Harriet Beecher Stowe 146 

9 



10 CONTENTS 

VI. The Transcendental Moye^fent .... 149 

Religion and Philosophy in New England . . . 149 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 155 

Henry David Thoreau 168 

VII. National Life and Culture 

Oratory 

History and Criticism .... 
-a- Henry AVadsworth Longfellow 
-Jw John Greenleaf Whittier 
— James Russell Lowell 

Oliver Wendell Holmes .... 

Minor Poetry and Miscellaneous Prose 

Walt Whitman 



180 
180 
186 
190 
204 
215 
230 
241 
252 



PART III. LATER ACTIVITY 

From the Atlantic to the Pacific — 1860-1900 

VIII. Poetry in the South 270 

IX. Prose and Poetry in the West 276 

X. Poetry and Criticism in the East .... 286 

XL Late Move.aients in Fiction . . . . . 293 

Conclusion 305 

Appendix 

A Classified List of Late and Contemporary Writers . 311 

Chronological Outline 328 

References ^ 336 

Suggestions for Reading and Study .... 340 

Index .,,... 355 



INTRODUCTION 



The English colonies on the western Atlantic seaboard, and 
their political successors, the United States of America, have 
won, by many and varied achievements, a conspicuous place in 
the histor}^ of civilization. But no form of art stands high 
among those achievements, and American literature cannot 
3^et take rank with the great literatures of the world. It 
could scarcely be otherwise. Before the arts can flourish, 
there must be a certain security of social and political life. 
This security can come only after its foundations have been 
laid in the struggle for existence itself, in the successful pro- 
viding of food, clothing, and shelter. The occupants of the 
New World have been busy bringing the wilderness under cul- 
tivation, experimenting with a bewildering variety of soil and 
climate, and exploring the countless sources of material wealth. 
Above all, a population nominally English, but really of 
diverse nationalities, has been learning the hard lesson of 
self-government under novel and trying conditions. There 
has been little leisure to devote to art. 

It is further to be considered that the brief life of the 
nation, as such, has fallen in an age of remarkable scientific and 
material advance. What other centuries were content to 
refer to vaguely as "wonders of nature" have in the nineteenth 
century been searchingly investigated, to the opening up of new 
and apparently boundless fields of knowledge. The impulse 
once given, it is not surprising that men should neglect the 
more abstruse creations of their brains for the absorbing study 

11 



12 AMEHICAN LITERATURE 

of the creations around them and the utilization of their dis- 
coveries in the practical concerns of life. Energies that in 
another age would have gone to the making of a statue or a 
poem have been steadily diverted to science and the mechanic 
arts. And a nation like our own, young and eager, with all 
the means for scientific investigation and material progress and 
none of the stimulus of ancient art, would of all nations feel 
this impulse most keenly. 

The effects upon our literature are evident. During only 
one of the three centuries since the permanent occupation 
of America by the English people has any literature worthy 
of the name been produced. Few of our writers have been 
writers primarily, and few of them have left any such volume 
of work as we are accustomed to associate with the names of 
great European authors. In quality, too, our literature is 
often like a thin wine, without body. Many things are lacking 
to it. A transplanted people, we are not as a race that is 
born to the inheritance of its land and bound together by 
long community of interests and of purpose. We have no 
barbarous or legendary past to enrich our chronicles and fire 
our imaginations. Chivalry and feudalism have no direct 
part in us. We have no national deities or patron saints ; no 
ancient and mystic priesthood; no fairies, no knights, no cour- 
tiers, no kings. We have not even a distinct national name 
about which traditions might gather and which, like Merrie 
England or la helle France, would serve to conjure with in the 
realm of art. Thus our literature quite lacks the peculiar 
flavor sometimes known as race. It lacks, too, the atmosphere 
of aristocracy, and, in a sense, the atmosphere of religion.* 
Worst of all, perhaps, it lacks the feeling for artistic repose, 
the sense for proportion and beauty; for the strenuous moral 
and intellectual life of our ancestors has left us a heritage 
aesthetically barren. 

* Charles Johnston, in the Atlantic Monthly, July, 



INTRODUCTION 13 

Still, there are compensations. A new world is at least 
new, and its writers may find novel themes and fresh inspira- 
tion just over their thresholds. Our colonial and national 
history has not been uneventful. There have been religious 
crusades, financial and industrial panics, and wars both for- 
eign and domestic. The very social chaos which paralyzes 
art, the conflict and tumult of diverse races struggling towards 
unit}', is, to one who can detach himself and observe, a highly 
dramatic spectacle. Besides, the world of nature does not 
materially change. In a new country, indeed, the lure of out- 
door life is peculiarly strong. And in variety of natural 
features, in charm of landscape, in diversity of seasons, in 
wealth of flora and fauna, the old world has no advantage over 
the new. Still less does human nature change, and wherever 
two men find room to stand together, the primal passions will 
assert themselves and the poet find his song. It was only a 
question of time when there should be an American literature, 
and the time was not unduly long in coming. 

Now, indeed, some portion of our literature is safely en- 
shrined as classic, and it is possible for us to look back upon a 
fairly definite and complete epoch. The literary spirit, the 
instinct to record the thoughts, feelings, and observations of 
men, has its fiuctuations. At times it is strong and fertile, 
at other times weak, at still others barren. But at no time in 
our history has the literary spirit been absolutely barren, and 
through one period it was strong enough to leave a record at 
once great and worthy — great in insight and originality^ and 
of adequate art. Now that that period seems to be passed and 
that its leaders are gone with it, the history of American 
literature may be written without fear or apology. 

Manifestly there can be no elaborate time-division of a 
literature that has had but one era of high accomplishment. 
The simple facts stand out clearly: first, that down to the 
very beginning of the nineteenth century scarcely a book was 



14 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

published in America that is read to-day for its imaginative 
or artistic qualities; second, that at the beginning of the 
nineteenth century letters were first recognized in America 
as a profession, and that though the work of the best writers 
was still, for several decades, either slender or crude, the 
literature of the nation grew steadily in breadth and quality 
until, toward the middle of the century, we had in the East a 
group of writers who were recognized as great both at home 
and abroad, and whose work we still rank clearly above all 
that has been produced since; and third, that in the last 
few decades, or since our civil war, the literary impulse has 
betrayed itself in every corner of our land, sending forth a 
wealth of literature of which some account must be taken, but 
upon which judgment cannot yet be final. These three large 
and well defined periods may be indicated thus: 

I. The Beginnings, extending from the founding of the 
colony at Jamestown in 1607 down to about 1800. 

II. The Creative Impulse, extending from the first 
decade of the nineteenth century to the civil war. 

III. The Period of Later Activity, extending from the 
civil war to the present time. 

It will be well, at this point, to note also some geographical 
distinctions. Before the wide diffusion of our literature with 
the growth of our territory and population, it flourished only 
along the Atlantic seaboard. That region may be conven- 
iently divided into three sections: the North, or Massachu- 
setts Bay region — New England — with a literary capital at 
Boston ; the South, or the region about the James River and 
Chesapeake Bay, with literary capitals (in the later time) at 
Richmond, Baltimore, and Washington; and the somewhat 
vaguely defined intermediate region of the Hudson and Dela- 
ware Rivers, with capitals at New York and Philadelphia. 
We shall find first one and then another of these sections the 
centre of the highest literary activity. 



PAET I 

BEGINI^mGS 



FROM THE SETTLEMENT OF VIRGINIA IN 1607 TO THE 
END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



15 



CHAPTER I 
THE COLONIAL PERIOD.— CAVALIEE, PURITAN, AND QUAKEB 

1607—1765 

Our forefathers did not find it easy to cultivate simul- 
taneously the soil and the Muses. Their situation, like that 
of most colonists, was an unnatural one. There was a lack 
of harmony between themselves and their surroundings which 
only generations of slow adjustment could remedy. On the 
one hand they were far too civilized to develop a folk- 
literature of song and legend, while on the other hand their 
environment was too primitive to foster that literature of 
culture which the educated element among them was fitted to 
enjoy. Tn England the era immediately before and after the 
colonization of America was eminently an era of court literature. 
Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, warrior, romancer, and poet, was 
the ideal of the early Elizabethans. Spenser never ceased to 
mourn his half-enforced banishment to the wilds of Ireland. 
The dramatists flocked to London. Bacon rose to be lord 
chancellor and a peer. Milton, half a century later, was 
secretary to the Commonwealth. Dryden was poet laureate. 
Addison was secretary of state. Pope was a London "wit," 
who throve, like his predecessors, under a system of liberal 
patronage. It was too much to expect that the men who 
crossed the sea and changed their sky should change also 
their nature and find in their strange surroundings inspiration 
to some new kind of song. 

Of course, an original genius might have arisen here. 

17 



18 THE COLONIAL PERIOD 

But original geniuses are rare, and the actual numbers of the 
new inhabitants were so small that the law of chance was against 
such an event. Besides, men or families with a strong bias 
toward literature and art were not likely to cast in their lot 
with bands of adventurers. The charms of nature were little 
felt or understood. The modern romantic spirit was not yet rife, 
and poets did not fly to the wilderness to assuage their woes or 
minister to their love of the picturesque. Not for more than 
a century was a Chateaubriand to visit our shores, penetrate 
the "forest primeval," and stand in rapt admiration on the 
banks of the Mississippi while the trunks of fallen oaks and 
pines floated past him between the islands of yellow water- 
lilies. Moreover, those of Puritan faith, coming here for 
freedom to worship God after their own manner, were 
almost wholly bound up in that worship. The emotional 
side of their nature, finding the satisfaction of its needs in 
their religion, led them neither to the solace of the fields 
and the sky nor to the delights of art. Of art, indeed, they 
were suspicious, as something concerning itself more with 
form than with spirit, a worship, as it were, of graven images, 
and intimately connected with Rome and Romanism, the 
objects of their most deadly hatred. 

Yet almost from the first day of the landing of the colo- 
nists, at Jamestown in 1607 and at Plymouth in 1620, writing 
went on; for many of the colonists were, after the manner 
of their time, educated people, and the leaders at least were 
lettered men. The first books, of course, remained long in 
manuscript or were sent to England for publication. By 
1639, however, a printing-press was imported and set up at 
Cambridge. On it were printed, first a sheet or pamphlet. 
The Freeman s Oath, and second, Pierce's Almanach. The 
Bay Psalm Book, 1640, was the first printed book. In 1636 
a college (now Harvard University) was founded and two 
years later named after the man who endowed it with one-half 



HISTORY 19 

of his estate and a library of three hundred volumes. By the 
middle of the century public instruction was compulsory in 
most of the colonies. A translation of the Bible into the 
Algonkin tongue, made hj John Eliot, the "apostle to the 
Indians," was published in 1661-1663, the first Bible printed 
m British America. Just when the quaint little JSfew England 
Primer began its long career of usefulness is not known; 
there is a notice of a second impression of it in an almanac 
of 1691.* In 1704 the Boston News-Letter marked the advent 
of American journalism, the power which has grown to such 
gigantic proportions. 

Such were a few of the significant events during the first 
century of literary industry in America, an industry that for 
full another century was to continue producing books which, 
in Charles Lamb's sense, are no books, literature that is not 
literature. Our review of this product may not be extended 
or searching; the books themselves are for the most part 
not easily accessible, sufficient proof that they are not live 
books. The entire portion of the colonial literary product 
that either aimed at or in any measure deserved permanence 
falls into a simple classification under three heads — history, 
poetry, and theology. 

HISTORY 

The history comprises all the prose of a narrative or 

descriptive nature. It was but natural that some of the 

„ , . colonists should write down a record of their 

Captain 

John Smith, doings from day to day, in the form either of 
15/0-1632. diaries or of reports to the promoters of the colo- 
nies in the mother country. Sometimes these records became 

♦Extract from '-.4/1 Alphabet of Lessons for Youtli": 

'^TTOLINESS becomes God's house for- "T7-EEP thy heart with all diligence, 
ever. for out of it are the issues of life. 

"TT is good for me to draw near unto "T lARS shall have their part in the 
God, lake which burns with fire and 

brimstone." 



20 THE COLONIAL PERIOD 

more ambitious and took on the organized form and propor- 
tions of a professed history. Captain John Smith, the lead- 
ing spirit of the Jamestown colony, whose affections seem 
to have been evenly divided between his sword and his 
pen, has the honor of inscribing his plain name first on 
the roll of the English writers of this new land. In 1608 
he sent back to England his Trite Relation of occurrences 
in Virginia, and sixteen years later, while he was living 
in England, he published his General History of Virginia, 
a more comprehensive account of those matters relating to 
the New World with which he was familiar. 

It must be remembered, however, that Smith was in no 
rightful sense an American, but an Englishman, a fair type 
of the courtly, worldly royalists who came to be known a little 
later in English history and in Virginian colonization as 
"cavaliers." He had travelled eastward as well as westward, 
and he wrote much that had nothing to do with America. 
He spent less than three years, all told, in this country. His 
name and his works belong to England, where, of course, their 
little lustre was even in his own day quite eclipsed. Yet we 
are not ashamed to lay part claim to those two works, the 
first literary fruits of the inspiration of the wilderness. 
They may not be accurate as history, but they are a voice 
out of momentous days and deeds. For Smith put into his 
work no slight measure of the heroic, the Homeric quality, 
which gives vitality to work in any age. Even when he 
was not true to facts he could not help being true to him- 
self, and he unconsciously portrays himself with all his virtues 
and vices, his energy, his bluntness, his bravado, and his 
egotism. There is no reason, however, to suppose, as has 
often been charged, that he was deliberately untruthful. The 
pretty story of Pocahontas, for example, was for awhile discred- 
ited. But there is more reason to believe the story than to doubt 
it. We must simply remember the romantic spirit of the man and 



HISTORY 21 

read him by that light. When we hear his tales of the gigantic 
Susquehannocks whose language ' 'sounded from them as a voice 
in a vault" and whose calves were "three-quarters of a yard 
about," we recognize the writer for a man of imagination and 
a worthy member of the literary guild. He was bound to 
magnify a little his deeds, and through them the deeds of his 
patrons, the "most noble Lords and worthy Gentlemen" of 
King James's court; and though he chose to call his book a 
history and not a romance, he was not the man to hang upon 
any subtle distinction between the words liistory and story. 
He tells his story as an "honest Souldier" should, with due 
regard to the entertainment of his readers. He can be prac- 
tical, too, as well as romantic. He studies the winds and the 
clouds in their relation to seasons and harvests. He counts 
the ears on a stalk of corn and the grains on an ear. He 
describes in one place, with minutest detail, the methods of 
cooking maize, but protests that burnt and powdered corn-cob 
"never tasted well in bread nor broth." On this last point, 
indeed, none will question his veracity. 

Of other writers in the South, both in Smithes time and 
later, honest chroniclers enough, the names belong to history 

and not to literature. An exception might be 
strachey ^lade in the case of one William Strachey, who 

in his passage to Virginia in the fleet of Sir George 
Somers and Sir Thomas Gates was wrecked on the Bermuda 
Islands. His True Reportory of the Wrack, probably written 
in Virginia in 1610 and published in England in 1612, is a 
really graphic and imaginative account, and criticism has 
almost certainly determined that from it, or from Strachey 
himself, Shakespeare drew some of the pictures and phrases 
used in the description of Prospero's island in Tlie Tempest. 
So slender is the link which connects American letters 
with the highest of England's names. But the South, 
always conservative and always careless about education, 



22 THE COLONIAL PERIOD 

has never been prolific of writers, and with this short notice of 
John Smith and William Strachey we take a long leave of 
that region. 

The historical writers of colonial New England, from 

G-overnor William Bradford in the seventeenth century to 

Thomas Prince in the eighteenth, were likewise of 

Samuel the plodding, sedate chronicler type. One rather 

Seicall, . . , , 1 

1652-1730. more than the rest, however, writing with the hum- 
blest intentions, succeeded in touching to a little life 
the record of his times. This was Chief Justice Samuel Sew- 
all, of Massachusetts, the publication of whose diary onl}" a few 
3^ears since has given him a new interest in our eyes. He is mem- 
orable for several things. He was a judge in the witchcraft trials 
of 1692, passing sentence for which he afterward made a public 
confession of repentance. He published perhaps the first 
American tract against slaveiy. And of one of his prophecies 
Whittier has made a touching poem, praying that 

"Green forever the memory be 

Of the Judge of the old Theocracy." 

But it is the diary, faithfully kept through a long lifetime, 
that forces itself most upon our attention, and while we can 
not take a profound interest in its minute, gossipy, and 
unimaginative record — in the fact that the Judge period- 
ically had his hair cut, or that his pussy-cat died in her 
thirteenth year — the book makes j^et its appeal to our human 
sympathies and will he read by many who could not be 
persuaded to look into the more scholarly works of Bradford 
and Prince. 

POUTRY 

Poetry in early New England throve even less than 
''Bay Psalm narrative and descriptive prose. Indeed, to call 
Book.'' any of the verse of that time poetry, argues 

a lack of humor. The Bay Psahn Bool-, for instance, was a 



POETRY 23 

heroic attempt, conspired in by three worthy divines, to set 
the Psalms to metre and, by great good fortune, rhyme. The 
verses were intended to be sung to the five or ten tunes 
which the churches possessed. Here is one of the more 
successful stanzas : 

'*Yee gates lift-up your heads 
and doors everlasting, 
doe yee lift-up: & there into 

shall come the glorious-King." 

Few will succeed in reading even this stanza smoothly at 

the first attempt. Such utter uncouthness of form, as far 

removed from Miltonic harmonies as "from the centre thrice 

to the utmost pole," shows how small apart even the mere 

reading of poetry can. have pla3^ed in the culture of the New 

World Puritans. 

Nevertheless, the Puritans raised up poets according 

to their tastes and abilities. The poems of one of these, 

Mistress Anne Bradstreet, were introduced to the 

Bradstreet. British and American public of 1650 under this allur- 

Michaei j^g title, devised doubtless by her London printer: 

Wiggleswarth. rni m i -ir i i • t - 

llic lentil Muse lately sprung up in America; or, 

Several Poems, compiled with great variety of loit and learn- 
ing, full of delight. Whatever delight may lie concealed in 
the rather voluminous verses, — The Four Monarchies, The 
Four Elements, Contemplations (published later), and other 
such physical and metaphysical speculations, — is not worth 
seeking for to-day. Some genuine terror, however, may still 
be extracted from the verses of one of Mrs. Bradstreet's 
contemporaries, Michael Wigglesworth, who in his Day of 
Doom (1662) set to a lilting, double-rhymed. Yankee Doodle sort 
of measure his conception of a Calvinistic Judgment, infant 
damnation and all. The following is a fair example of the 
product of the Reverend Mr. Wigglesworth's poetic frenzy: 



24 THE COLONIAL PERIOD 

"They wring their hands, their caitiff-hands 

and gnash their teeth for terrour; 
They cry, they roar for anguish sore, 

and gnaw their tongues for horrour. 
But get away with out delay, 

Christ pities not your cry: 
Depart to Hell, there may you yell, 

and roar Eternally." 

Sad to relate, the poem was as popular in its day (and its day 

lasted a hundred years) as the Psalm of Life has been in ours. 

Of some thirty pre-revolutionary writers of verse whose 

names stand recorded in the more elaborate histories of our 

literature, one more may be mentioned here. This 
Godf^^ was Thomas Grodfrey, a watchmaker's apprentice 

of Philadelphia, who died in the South in 1763 
at the age of twenty-seven. His poems were published 
two years later. The most notable among them was The 
Prince of Parthia^ a blank-verse tragedy, which, though 
like the rest crudely juvenile, points at least to an intimate 
acquaintance with the dramas of Shakespeare. The imitation 
is sometimes very bald. These lines, for example, are a clear 
echo of Horatio's: 

"E'en the pale dead, affrighted at the horror, 

As though unsafe, start from their marble jails. 

And howling through the streets are seeking shelter." 

And these, of Lear's: 

"Dead! she's cold and dead! 
Her eyes are closed, and all my joys are flown, 
Now burst, ye elements, from your restraint, 
Let order cease, and chaos be again. 
Break! break, tough heart!"* 

But there are also passages that show a power quite inde- 
pendent of imitation, and Thomas Grodfrey deserves to be 

* See Hamlet, I., i., 115; Lear, III., ii. 



THEOLOGY 25 

remembered as the first of America's few adventurers into 
the dramatic field. His drama was a closet drama only. 
The first native play to be regularly staged and acted was 
(probably — it is never safe to be positive about such matters) 
Royall Tyler's satirical comedy, The Contrast^ 1786. 

THEOLOGY 

History, poetry, and theology, — these three were the 
forms in which colonial literature chiefly enshrined itself, 
and the greatest of these was theology. The Puritans who 
settled New England were practically religious refugees, men 
seeking a land where they should be free to worship as 
their consciences dictated. Their government was essentially 
theocratic — God was their great law-giver and the Bible 
their chief statute-book. The New England Primer was 
half catechism and prayer-book. The church, or meeting- 
house, was the centre of the community, and the ministers 
were the most learned men. It was inevitable that literature, 
which always reflects the highest intellectual and spiritual 
interests of a people, should take on a strong theological cast. 

This theology — by which of course is meant, not religion 
itself, but a special system and doctrine of religion (in this 
case chiefly Calvinism) — appears first in the unlovely guise of 
controversy. The persecution which the Puritans had en- 
dured had not chastened them. They could be as Intolerant 
of those who did not agree with them as ever their own perse- 
cutors had been, and in their course they saw no inconsistency. 
The profound conviction that they alone were right justified 
them — left, indeed, no other course open. In 1637 the Synod 
of Massachusetts took a definite stand against religious tolera- 
tion. In the same year Anne Hutchinson was banished for 
heresy; and Roger Williams, the great apostle of toleration, 
had been banished two years before. Heresy ])ecame the crime 
of the age, and ministers thundered from the pulpit, while 
laymen poured out vials of printed wrath. 



26 THE COLONIAL PERIOD 

Perhaps the most striking book of this earlier period was 
Nathaniel Ward's Simple Cohhhr o/Agawam, published at Lon- 
don in 1G47. Ward had himself been driven out of 
fvard^^^^ England for heresy by Archbishop Laud, and, to 
judge from his book, he found solace in America 
by attacking everything that offered a fair mark, from the doc- 
trines of the Baptists to the Parisian millinery of the women. 
' 'I dare take upon me to be the herald of New England so far 
as to proclaim to the world, in the name of our colony, that 
all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other enthusiasts, 
shall have free liberty — to keep away from us ; and such as 
will come — to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the 

better To tell a practical lie is a great sin, but j'et 

transient; but to set up a theoretical untrath is to warrant 
every lie that lies from its root to the top of every branch it 
hath, which are not a few!" Such proclamations would hardly 
win converts — the spirit is too warlike to be Christian. Yet 
the force and picturesqueness of the style suit well with the 
independence of the opinions, and it is eas}' to see behind 
them the earnestness of the man. 

Greater men than Ward took part in this theological con- 
flict. There was John Cotton, one of the greatest pulpit 
orators of the time, who had likewise been driven 
John Cotton, f^^jj^ Ensiand by Laud, and who came from the 

15S5-1652. iD J J 

Roger old Boston to the new, which was named in his 

Williams. j^ ^y-^1^ 2-^^lg Qf Ward's fiery and contro- 

{?) 1604-1683. -^ 

versial temper, he had yet attempted to justify the 
banishment of Roger Williams, and when the latter, in defence, 
published his Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Con- 
science (1644), Cotton felt bound to reply to it with The Bloody 
Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb (1647). 
Whereupon Williams naturally came forward again — but the 
very titles of the books are no longer worth reprinting. 

In some respects this theological literature grew in time 



THEOLOGY . 27 

even more stern, less beautiful. An age of fanatieism followed, 
marked by several manifestations, such as the Salem witch- 
craft craze of 1692 and the great religious revival of 1740-1745. 
It almost seems as if the Puritans, left to themselves in the 
wilderness (for there were few recruits from the old world 
after 1640), were in danger of reverting to the gross supersti- 
tions of primitive peoples. Their history proves at least that 
there can be education without enlightenment. Toward the 
end of the seventeenth century we find such book-titles as 
Discourse Concerning Comets; Illustrious Providences; Memor- 
able Providences relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, with a 
Discourse on the Poioer and Malice of Devils; Wonders of the 
Invisible World. 

All the books just named were written by Increase and 
Cotton Mather, father and son, both eminent divines, and both 

indefatioable writers. Cotton Mather, indeed, 
Cotton ^ ' ' 

Mather, stands clearlj" at the head of the writers of colonial 

1C63-1728. ^^^ England. His grandfathers, John Cotton 
and Richard Mather, had been, like his father, preachers and 
writers before him, and his son was a preacher and writer 
after him. He was a prodigy of learning, who spent ten hours a 
day in his study, and who published in one year fourteen books 
and pamphlets, and in his life-time nearly four hundred. His 
great book, over which he prayed and fasted and wept, and which 
was published in folio — the only folio in our literature — in 
1702, is entitled 3Iagnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesias- 
tical History of New England from its First Planting in the Year 
1620 unto the Year of our Lord 1698. It is primarily a church 
history, as the title and introduction indicate : 

"I WRITE the Wonders of theCrmisTiAN Religion, flying from the 
depravations of Europe, to the American Strand; and, assisted by the 
Holy Author of that Religion, I do with all conscience of Truth, 
required therein by Him, who is the Truth itself, report the won- 
derful displays of His infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and Faith- 



28 THE COLONIAL PERIOD 

fulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath irradiated an Indian 
Wilderness." 

The book is difficult to describe, difficult indeed to read, though 
as students of xlmerican literature we are bound to hold it in 
reverence; "the one single literary landmark," says Charles 
Francis Adams, ' 'in a century and a half of colonial and pro- 
vincial life — a geologic record of a glacial period." Our great 
New England writers have all been more or less familiar with it. 
Longfellow, for example, drew from it the legend versified in 
his poem, The Phantom Ship. But as a historical document it 
is quite untrustworthy in details ; its chief value lies in the light 
which it throws upon the theological interests and the supersti- 
tious temper of the times. Its literary value, too, is slight. Beau- 
tiful and imaginative phrases may be found in it, but in a larger 
sense it can scarcely be said to have any style of its own, such a 
conglomeration is it of the fragmentary learning of all ages 
gathered together to embellish the plain statements beneath. 
All the pedantic Aices of the fantastic school of folio writers 
are here in their most exaggerated form. The pages are 
sprinkled with learned allusions, G-reek, Latin, and Hebrew- 
phrases, quotations, italics, puns, Bible references, etc., etc. 
Thus, for example, runs the account of the presidents of Har- 
vard College: 



'O' 



"After the death of Dr. Hoar, the place of President pro tempore, 
was put upon ]Mr. Urian Oakes, the excellent Pastor of the Church at 
Cambridge; who did so, and would no otherwise accept of the place; 
though the offer of a full settlement in the place was afterwards im- 
portunately made unto him Reader, let us now upon 

another account behold the students of Harvard-Colledge, as a ren- 
dezvous of happy Druids, under the influence of so rare a President. 
But, alas! our joy must be short lived; for, on July 25, 1681, the 
stroak of a sudden death fell'd the tree, Qui tantum inter caput extulit 

omnes Mr. Oakes, thus being transplanted into the better 

world, the Presidentship was immediately tendered unto Mr. Increase 
Mather; but his Church, upon the application of the overseers unto 



THEOLOGY 29 

them to dismiss him unto the place whereto he was now chosen, 
refusing to do it, he decHned the motion. Wherefore, on April 10, 

1682, Mr. John Rogers was elected unto that place He 

was one of so sweet a temper, that the title of delicise humani generis 
might have on that score been given him; and his real pietij set off 
with the accomplishments of a gentleman, as a gem set in gold. In 
his Presidentship, there fell out one thing particularly, for which the 
Colledge has cause to remember him. It was his custom to be some- 
what long in his daily prayers (which our Presidents use to make) 
with the scholars in the Colledge-hall. But one day, without being 
able to give reason for it, he was not so long, it may be by half, as 
he used to be. Heaven knew the reason! The scholars, returning to 
their chambers, found one of them on fire, and the fire had pro- 
ceeded so far, that if the devotions had held three minutes longer, 
the Colledge had been irrecoverably laid in ashes, which now was 
happily preserved. But him also a praemature death, on July 2, 
1684, the day after the Commencement, snatcht away from a society 
that hoped for a much longer enjoyment of him, and counted them- 
selves under as black an eclipse as the Sun did happen to be, at the 
hour of his expiration." 

Imposing as this book was in its day, and important as it still 
is, it finds almost no readers now but students of history. The 
third and latest edition was published in 1852. 

Theology took yet another turn, — from controversy, through 
fanaticism and superstition, back to abstract disquisition. In 
Jonathan ^^^^ last-named phase we see it most strikingly 
Edwards, exhibited by the career and works of Jonathan 
1703-1/58. Edwards, who was for twenty-three years pastor 
of the church at Northampton, Massachusetts, subsequently 
missionary to the Indians, and finally for a short time 
president of the college of New Jersey (Princeton). Edwards 
was a man of remarkable intellect, a born reasoner, and, 
living when and where he did, he naturally turned the powers 
of his brilliant mind to theology. He took the literal 
statements of the Bible, and with unshrinking logic pushed 
them to the most terrible conclusions. He could depict 



30 THE COLONIAL PERIOD 

— for with all his logic he had a poetic imagination — the 
glories of heaven and the happiness of the saints, but he be- 
came most notorious for those sermons which were devoted to 
portraying the miseries of the damned. The religious excite- 
ment of 1740-1745, known as "the Great Awakening," during 
which the English preacher Whitefield preached to assemblies of 
thirty thousand people on Boston Common, took its origin in 
Edwards's church. Edwards is best remembered, however, 
not for his sermons, but for his monumental work on the Free- 
dom of the Will, published in 1754, In this he tried to prove 
that man is not a free agent and yet is responsible and punish- 
able for all his misdeeds, and he argued so well that few have 
tried to confute him. Nevertheless, common sense to-day 
generally refuses to be troubled by such speculations, and the 
once famous treatise is more often alluded to than read. 
Jonathan Edwards stands simply as the one great meta- 
physician, or builder of a systematic philosophy, that America 
has produced. Emerson, in the next century, is a philosopher 
of a very different t3'pe. 

There is one other writer who must be named in this con- 
nection, though his life touches the Revolutionary period and 
his work is not properly theology. This is 
wooiman, John Woolman, of whom Charles Lamb said, 
1720-1772. "Gret the writings of John Wooiman by heart, 
and love the early Quakers." He was a New Jersey tailor 
and itinerant Friend who in his life-time published several 
tracts in opposition to the "Keeping of Negroes" and who 
died in 1772, lea^ing behind a Journal which was published 
in 1774. There have been many editions of the Journal since, 
one of the last having been edited by Whittier, and it would 
not be quite fair to say that Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography 
is the only American book of the eighteenth century that lives 
to-day. TToolman's book lives, although obscurely; indeed it 
has in it a simplicity and religious sincerity that will remind 



THEOLOGY 31 

one of Bunyan, together with a sweetness and tenderness even 
beyond Bunyan and sufficient to account for its hold upon 
life. One does not readily forget, for example, such a con- 
fession of youthful thoughtlessness and remorse as this : 

"Once going to a neighbor's house, I saw on the way a robin 
sitting on her nest, and as I came near she went off, but having 
young ones, flew about, and with many cries expressed her con- 
cern for them. I stood and threw stones at her, till one striking 
her she fell down dead. At first I was pleased with the exploit, but 
after a few minutes was seized with horror, as having, in a sportive 
way, killed an innocent creature while she was careful of her young. 
I beheld her lying dead, and thought those young ones, for which 
she was so careful, must now perish for want of their dam to nourish 
them; and after some painful considerations on the subject, I climbed 
up the tree, took all the young birds, and killed them, supposing 
that better than to leave them to pine away and die miserably. And 
I believed in this case that Scripture proverb was fulfilled, 'The tender 
mercies of the wicked are cruel.' I then went on my errand, 
but for some hours could think of nothing else but the cruelties I 
had committed, and was much troubled." 

It is pleasant to relieve the impression left by the stern 
theologians of New England with this humble Christian diary 
of a New Jersey Quaker. 



CHAPTER II 

TKAXSITION .—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
1706-1790 

The figure of one o-reat xlmerican looms lar^e throug-h the 
eighteenth centnrv. Born but three years after the birth of 
Jonathan Edwards, and dying but nine years before the death 
of Washington, Benjamin Franklin spans with his career the 
entire transition from American colonial dependence tx) inde- 
pendence, union, and nationality. The story of this poor 
tallow-chandler's son and printer's apprentice, migrating from 
Boston to Philadelphia, and growing and expanding with the 
fortunes of his country until he came to be a lion of the 
social centres of Europe and ambassador to the coui'ts of 
kings, reads like a romance. But stripped of its glamour it is 
seen to be a plain tale of sterling worth and tireless industry. 

We shall not repeat it here: it is best read in his own 
words in the famous Autohiography. Xor does it come prop- 
A Mam sided ^^^- witMn the scope of a history of literature to 
Character. enumerate the ser\ices which this many-sided man 
rendered to America and the world during his long career, — 
services which range from the invention of stoves to the 
demonstration that lightning and electricity are the same, and 
from the development of newspaper advertising to the drawing 
up of the first plan for the union of the American colonies. 
For Franklin was journalist, scientist, philosopher, statesman, 
diplomatist, and philanthropist in one. As for the writings 

32 




"-^ 








JOISTAXHAN EDWARDS 
BENJAMIN FRANIiX>IN 



COXXON MAXHER 
PHILIP FRENEAU 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 33 

which he left behind him, though they fill nine volumes, they 
were produced incidentally, and were quite the least part of his 
life-work. His name does not primarily belong to literature. 

Yet Franklin is for more than one reason exceedingly 
interesting to the student of literature. In the first place, his 
writings, like his life, mark a transition. He represents a new 
spirit in American letters — the change that had come over the 
people in the generations of their existence in the New World. 
The practical instincts, — self-reliance, shrewdness, humor, 
thrift, — all of those qualities that we sum up in the word 
Yankee, were being surely developed by a life of constant 
hardship and enforced self-denial. And Franklin is the first 
great exponent of them. While he still held to many of the 
sterner virtues of the Puritans, he found the mainspring of 
those virtues on earth rather than in heaven. He preached, 
not godliness, but honesty, charity, and manliness; and he 
accomplished quite as good results as the Puritans, by ordering 
his life, not as if he were going to die to-morrow, but rather 
as if he were going to live a hundred years. Such is the 
gospel of his Poor Richard's Almanac, through which he first 
came to fame ; and the new American spirit at its best — and at 
its worst, too, for it was provincially rude and unenlightened, 
— is to be found reflected in the pages of that curious annual. 

It will be remembered that an almanac was one of the 
first publications of the American press. Indeed it is only 
in our own day of cheap books and newspapers 
B'^h^ d " ^^^^ *^^^ particular form of light literature, com- 
bining information and advice with amusement, 
has lost its popularity. But it is safe to say that no almanac 
issued as a private enterprise was ever better adapted to its 
patrons or became more justly celebrated than that which 
Franklin began to issue in Philadelphia in the year 1732 and 
continued, mainly under his own supervision, for twenty-five 
years. The price of it was five pence, and the sales ran up to 



34 TEANSITION 

ten thousand copies a year. Such is its fame that to-day a 
single copy of the original will sell for twenty dollars. The 
Almanac professed to be written by "Richard Saunders, 
Philomath." There had been an English philomath of the 
same name, and there was also a famous English almanac 
called "Poor Robin." Of course the name "Poor Richard" 
was only a mask for Franklin, who openly announced himself 
as the printer of the pamphlet. That the philosoph}^ of Poor 
Richard was not always original, "but rather the gleanings 
of the sense of all ages and nations," imports little. That 
was only to be expected in a publication of such a nature. 
Franklin's genius showed itself in the way in which his philos- 
ophy was gathered and adapted to the tastes and needs of his 
readers. Poor Richard, who, according to his own description, 
was "excessive poor" and his "wife, good woman, excessive 
proud," became a very real personage to the thousands of 
people in all stations of life who quoted his pithy maxims and 
recited his homely verses. These were given the readier cur- 
rency for the humor that so often accompanied them. Indeed, 
the comic feature of the Almanac became easily its distinctive 
one, so that Poor Richard stands as a kind of forebear to a 
long line of droll philosophers, from Diedrich Knickerbocker 
to Tom Sawyer. The humor is frequently of a kind that the 
taste of the present age would denounce as vulgar or even 
obscene, but the general tone of the maxims is as wholesome 
as it is hearty. 

"God helps them that help themselves." 

*'He that drinks fast pays slow." 

"It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright." 

"Silks and satins, scarlet and velvets, put out the kitchen fire." 

"The poor man must walk to get meat for his stomach, the rich 
man to get a stomach to his meat." 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 35 

*'Tliree may keep a secret, if two of them are dead." 
"A good conscience is a continual Christmas." 
"He that by the jdIow would tlirive 
Himself must either hold or drive." 

And so they r.uu ou : "Keep thy shop," '-Early to bed," — 
nearly every tongue will finish them of its own accord, so 
familiar are they. This is literature only by a very liberal defini- 
tion indeed, but it is such literature as everybody could and did 
read, and its influence for good is beyond all calculation. The 
sajings were gathered together into a kind of running sermon 
for the preface of the edition of 1758, and this preface, under 
such titles as "Father Abraham's Speech," "The Way to 
Wealth," "La Science du Bonhomme Richard,"* has been 
printed literally hundreds of times and translated into more 
than a dozen lanouao-es. 

The Almanac, which afforded Franklin fame and competence 

in his early manhood, was late in life supplemented by a work 

of greater literary importance. This is his Auto- 

' Auto- hioqraphy, the only American book written before 

biography. ' u i ui j 

the nineteenth century that is still widely known 
and read. Its history is interesting. Franklin of course did 
not mean to write a book — we have said that he was not 
primaril}^ a man of letters. It was in 1771, while he was at 
the country home of the Bishop of St. Asaphs, in Hampshire, 
England, that he occupied some moments of leisure in writing- 
out an account of his early life in the form of a letter to 
his son, then Grovernor of New Jerse}^ Thirteen years later, 
after the manuscript had been actually thrown into the street 
in Philadelphia and picked up by a friend, who begged the 
author to complete it, Franklin, then at Passy, France, added 

* The Bon Homme Richard (that is, "Goodman Richard"), the famous flag- 
ship of Paul Jones, was named by Jones in honor of Franlclin at the time when 
Jones was put in command of it through Franklin's advice to the French gov- 
ernment. 



36 TRANSITION 

another chapter. And four years later still, at Philadelphia, 
only two years before his death, he continued the narrative, 
bringing it down to 1757, the year of the beginning of his 
public services abroad. A copy of this account having been 
sent to a friend in France, a portion of it was there translated 
into French and published, shortly after Franklin's death. 
This, it seems, — though the whole history is somewhat obscure, 
— was turned into English again and published at London in 
1793. Not till 1817 was there a direct publication of the 
manuscript, and not till 1868 of the original first draft. 

The book, though composed in this haphazard manner, and 
though incomplete and ill proportioned, is not without merits 
of style. Franklin has told us himself how studiously he 
cultivated his style, taking for his model Addison. But it is 
simplicity, rather than any studied grace, that gives the Auto- 
biography its charm. To this must be added a resolute moral 
purpose, everywhere apparent yet never morbid or offensive. 
The work was frankly intended for the instruction of Franklin's 
son, and it was a most happy accident that so incalculably 
widened its oflSce. Boys are no longer in demand to cut wicks 
for tallow candles ; even typesetting is a languishing trade ; but 
"self-made men" are still held in honor, and America will not 
soon reach the stage when her youth can afford to omit the 
reading of this simple life-story of one of her greatest men. 

Franklin wrote nothing else of large significance, though 
he wrote many things, both in jest and in earnest, both to 
serve his country's need and to afford an outlet for energies 
that scarcely knew how to pass an idle hour. Many trifles 
written while he was in France, like "The Ephemera," 
"The Whistle, " and the "Dialogue between Franklin and the 
Gout," designed for the amusement of the circle of wits who 
gathered about one Madame Brillon, or like the dream of the 
Elysian Fields in his letter to Madame Helvetius, show a 
French delicacy of fancy, a gayety and wit, that are suflS- 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 37 

cientlj rare in American letters and that are quite remarkable 
as coming from Franklin. They set one to wondering what 
this man might have done in literature had he chosen to be 
less of a statesman and philosopher. Such work as he did do, 
however, is on the whole purely American, — virile, blunt 
almost to rudeness, with only sufficient polish to give it cur- 
rency. He inculcated, as we have seen, a practical morality 
only, and he did this best in plain, unvarnished prose. We 
can see his limitation clearly enough, — not exactly that he was 
no visionary, but that he was blind on the side of enthusiasm 
and idealization, that his eyes were shut to the poetry of life. 
His great defect was a defect of spirituality, and he stands in 
strong contrast to even such feebly poetical men as Cotton 
Mather and Jonathan Edwards. ' 'There is a flower of religion, 
a flower of honor, a flower of chivalry," says Sainte-Beuve, 
''that you must not require of Franklin." Of course we 
remember the age. His life was fairly contemporaneous with 
that of the great French sceptic, Voltaire. And the eighteenth 
century in England was notoriously an age of prose, dull and 
unimaginative in comparison with the centuries before and 
the century after. 



CHAPTER III 

THE EEVOLUTIONAKY PERIOD. — INDEPENDENCE AND 

NATIONALITY 

1765-1800 

The review of colonial literature in the first chapter closed 
with the work of the theologians. It must not be supposed that 
theology died out in 2sew England. It will be found after 
another century tinffeino; still the writings even of those who 
openly rebelled against the Puritanism of their forefathers. 
But interest in it had to give way before new and more vital 
issues. Men cease to speculate on the freedom of the will 
when their actual freedom of thought and deed is threatened. 
The colonies were steadily grovdng. from Xew Hampshire on 
the north to G-eorgia on the south. They were becoming com- 
mercially and politically important. They found themselves 
far away from the powers that governed them, and they felt 
those powers to be often sadly out of sympathy with their 
wishes and needs. There arose discontent, rebellion, revolu- 
tion. 

To trace in detail the growing sentiment among the colo- 
nies in favor of union, and the growing dissatisfaction with 
British rule, which led to the Declaration of Independence of 
1776, is the business of the historian, and here a very few 
facts must suffice. The French and Indian War (175-1-1763) 
had indirectly much to do with the movement by showing the 
necessity for union, perhaps also by proving the prowess of 
American arms ; and the very year in which Edwards published 
his Freedom of the WiU the youthful AVashington marched 
with a regiment of soldiers into the western wilderness to 

38 



THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 39 

resist the claims of tlie French. But the more direct causes 
were the various measures passed by Parliament for the taxa- 
tion of the colonies, from the Importation Act of 1733 to the 
Stamp Act of 1765. Some of the earliest and bitterest opposi- 
tion came from Massachusetts, where, in 1761, we find the 
oratory of James Otis inciting among the people hints of 
resistance by arms. Fourteen years later, too, the first armed 
resistance came from Massachusetts. But the movement 
centralized farther south. In 1765 the young mountaineer 
Patrick Henry startled the Virginia House of Burgesses with 
his resolutions against British taxation. The First Colonial 
Congress met in 1765 at New York, the Second in 1774 at 
Philadelphia; the Declaration of Independence was signed at 
Philadelphia; the man chosen for commander-in-chief of the 
army and destined to become first President of the Union was 
a Virginian. 

The literature of the time might be expected to follow the 
course of these events, and in large measure it does. But 
this period, like the century and a half that had gone before, 
was not fruitful of good literature. For the most part it 
produced only the fleeting record of its own immediate con- 
cerns, in the form of revolutionary speeches, state documents, 
patriotic songs. These are all sincere enough and touch some 
of the noblest passions of humanity, but they lack art; and it 
takes art as well as sincerity to make any work lasting. The 
calm, the impartiality, the sense of perspective which art 
requires, are not at the command of one who celebrates contem- 
porary events. Franklin in his old age could write with masterly 
skill the story of his youth, but not even Franklin, granting 
him the poetic powers which he lacked, could have fitly sung 
our nation's birth. It was reserved for Hawthorne, in the nine- 
teenth century, to transfer Puritanism from history to literature, 
and our romancers are onl}^ just beginning to busy themselves 
seriously with our revolutionary age. 



40 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 

ORATORY AND POLITICAL PROSE 

It would be idle to review at length the orator}- of the period, 
or to single out the merits of this or that orator, from James 
Otis of Massachusetts, whom John Adams likened to a ' 'flame of 
fire, " to Patrick Henry of Virginia, who spoke, thought Jefferson, 
"as Homer wrote." These men spoke for their time, and not 
ineffectualh' ; and their speeches, devoutly preserved, fired the 
youthful patriotism of several generations and served as models 
to orators whose fame has since partially eclipsed their own. 
But we scarcely revert to their speeches now. If we do, we 
find them often painfully "academic"; the ideas are couched 
in stately and pompous phrase — long, balanced sentences, 
resonant. Latinized diction, elaborate figures. We half fancy 
the orators must have been cold and unimpassioned weighers 
of words and polishers of periods. It was not so. Their 
style was the only style taught and approved in their day. 
Precisely such oratory was to be ex^^ected of an age which in 
England elevated almost to the position of a literary dictator 
Samuel Johnson. Yet a few of the words then uttered echo 
still. We shall be slow indeed to forget that cry of Patrick 
Henry, the most gifted, least academic speaker of them all — 
that cry which is the largest and deepest expression of the 
spirit of the age: "G-ive me liberty or give me death." But 
our Revolution brought forth no Edmund Burke, eloquent, 
cultured, and profound, to measure himself with Demosthenes 
and Cicero of old. With the noble Farewell Address of Wash- 
ington in 1796, the old issues were fairly closed. Daniel 
Webster, our greatest orator, belongs wholly to another era. 

On the documentary side the literature was good, as such 
literature goes. The Declaration of Independence easily takes 
rank with the great state papers of history, not 
Jefferson, alone because of its political significance but also 
1743-1826. because of its lofty theme and its earnest and 
dignified expression. It was composed, of course, with the im- 



ORATORY AND POLITICAL PROSE 41 

mediate object of making a wide popular appeal, — <'a kind of 
war-song" says Professor Tyler, — and it was but natural that it 
should contain some " glittering generalities" and that its elo- 
quence should approach grandiloquence. But it has stood a long 
and severe test, and stood it well ; and no one, whether in youth 
or age, can read it to-day without some stir of emotion. To 
Thomas Jefferson belongs the chief credit of composing it, and 
Jefferson was a writer of considerable ability. His Summary 
View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, 
attracted contemporary attention in England, where it was 
republished by Edmund Burke. Moreover his voluminous and 
scholarly letters, which make up the bulk of his collected 
works, give him a respectable rank among writers of a class of 
literature that has been much neglected since his day. 

A most picturesque figure of this period, and one closely 
associated in ideas with Jefferson, was Thomas Paine, an Eng- 

^^ lishman who came to x\merica in 1774, at the aee of 

Thomas ' ° 

Paine, thirty-scven. He had neither the solid attainments 

1737-1809. jj^j. ^j^g cultivated tastes of Jefferson, but he had 
all of Jefferson's radicalism and was utterly fearless in parad- 
ing it. Jefferson had written on the Eights of America. Paine 
wrote later, in England, on the Rights of Man. He was an 
open sceptic and scoffer, at war generally with the established 
order of things. Such a revolutionary spirit belongs to no 
land, and when the American cause was won, Paine followed 
the torch of revolution to France, declaring, ' 'Where Liberty 
is not, there is my home." After spending a considerable 
time there and in England he returned to America, where 
he died in 1809. On the whole, Thomas Paine has been 
too persistently remembered for his violence and his so-called 
atheism, too little for his naturally humane instincts. His 
coarse and superficial Age of Reason may well be neglected. 
Besides, that book, like the Rights of Man, was not written in 
America. What Americans should remember him for are his 



42 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 

'seventy-six pamphlet, Common Sense, which may have tiimecl 
the tide of popular sentiment toward independence, and the 
series of tracts, entitled The Crisis, which he published through 
the long and terrible struggle that followed. Comm.on Sense 
was said to have been worth an army of twenty thousand men 
to the American cause, while the sixteen successive numbers 
of The Crisis, widely distributed among the soldiers, did price- 
less service in keeping alive their patriotism through the dark- 
est hours of Long Island and Valley Forge. It was in Com- 
mon Sense that Paine called George the Third the ' ' royal brute 
of Britain," and it was the first number' of The Crisis that 
opened with the still famous sentence, '-These are the times 
that try men's souls." 

Conspicuous among the statesmen who stood in opposition 
to the extreme democratic views of men like Jeflferson, were 

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John 
Federaii t " '^^^ " ^ tiil^ the adoption of the Constitution was 

still in debate and strongly opposed bj^ the " State - 
rights " theorists, these men ably supported it in a series of 
eightj'-five papers published anonymously in a Xew York 
journal and issued collectively in 1788 under the title of The 
Federalist. The papers are political essays of a high t^-pe, 
broad in principle, sound in argument, and stately in style, 
and are well worth the study of those who would cultivate 
that kind of writino-. 

POETRY 

The verse of the period, like the prose, rarely succeeded in 
detaching itself from current CA'ents ; that is to say, its inspira- 
tion was fitful and its aims were immediate and 
BaiiadJ"^ practical rather than ultimate and artistic. Patriotic 
songs and ballads, satires, squibs for the comers of 
newspapers, were the staple verse products. Tankte Doodle, of 
somewhat obscure origin, sprang then into a popularity that has 



POETRY 43 

waned only with the elevation of popular taste. Even then, 
it was carried chiefly by its air, and belongs rather to 
music than to literature. Music and patriotism together 
carried many a song of slender literary merits, such as 
Timoth}' Dwight's hj'mn, Columbia, Qolumbia, to Glory Arise, 
composed while its author was chaplain in the army during the 
campaign against Burgoj'ne in 1777, and Joseph Hopkinson's 
Hail Colunihia, first sung at the Chestnut Street Theatre in 
Philadelphia in 1798, to the popular air of "President's March." 
In 1775, 1776 John Trumbull, a Connecticut lawj^er, pub- 
lished a burlesque epic with the title of M' Fin gal, which 
he expanded into four cantos in 1782. It was a vigorous 
satire upon the Tories, and proved a powerful support to the 
Revolution in that divided age, running to thirty editions. 
In outward form it was modelled pretty closely after Butler's 
Hudihras, the famous English satire upon the Puritans. Bom- 
bast, coarse wit, a lilting measure, and bad double rhymes are 
almost necessarj' ingredients of a poem whose hero, Squire 
M'Fingal, "the vilest Tory in the town," is tried, condemned, 
tied to a pole, tarred, and subjected to a shower of down until 

•* Not Milton's six- wing' d angel gathers 
Such superfluity of feathers. ' ' 

Unquestionablj^ the best ballad of the time that has come 
down to us is an anon3^mous production, Hale in the Bush, 
composed in memory of the fate of young Nathan Hale, who 
was executed as a spy in September, 1776: 

** The breezes went steadily through the tall pines, 
A saying ' oh hu-ush !' a saying ' oh hu-ush !' 
As stilly stole by a bold legion of horse, 

For Hale in the bush, for Hale in the bush." 

The haunting quality of this opening stanza will be readily felt, 
and the entire poem is much superior to the earliest recorded 
and once famous American ballad of LovewelVs Fight (composed 



44 THE REVOLUTIOXARY PERIOD 

about 1724). In poiot of popularity, however, there was nothing 
among Revolutionary ballads to compete with the humorous 
Battle of the Kegs — hags the word must have been pronounced, 
if rhyming it with hags be trustworthy evidence. It was written 
in 1778 by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphia lawyer and 
signer of the Declaration of Independence, and father of the 
writer of Hail Cohimhia. Some kegs filled with powder and 
provided with a lighted fuse had been sent floating down among 
the British ships at Philadelphia and were promptly fired upon 
"with amazing courage." 

" The kegs, 'tis said, the' strongly made 
Of rebel staves and hoops, Sir, 
Could not oppose their powerful foes, 
The conquering British troops, Sir." 

All this popular verse barely escapes being dismissed as 
doggerel. The kind of height to which it could rise may be 
illustrated, perhaps, by one final example from Joel Barlow's 
Hasty Pudding. Barlow, like Dwight and Trumbull, was a 
Yale man of poetic proclivities, and in 1793, while he was 
abroad in Savoy, a dish of savory po/e?2^a stirred the memories 
of his palate and provoked his muse : 

*'I sing the sweets I know, the charms I feel, 
My morning incense, and my evening meal. 
The sweets of Hasty Pudding. Come, dear bowl, 
Glide o'er ray palate, and inspire my soul. 
The milk beside thee, smoking from the kine, 
Its substance mingled, married in with thine, 
Shall cool and temper thy superior heat 
And save the pains of blowing while I eat." 

He dedicated the poem, which was published in 1796, to Mrs. 
Washington, without any fear that the "first lady of the land" 
might be above taking interest in the homely concerns of a 
housewife. The flavor of the poem, like that of the corn-meal 
which goes to make the pudding, is a little strong, but our 
grandfathers relished it. 



POETRY 45 

There were more serious attempts at poetry than these — 
some, indeed, most serious. Dr. Dwight, of Columbia fame, 

tried his hand at an epic in eleven books and ten 
Heroic thousand lines, The Conquest of Canaan (1785); 

and Joel Barlow wrote a Vision of Columbus (1787) 
which was afterwards expanded into the ten books of The 
Columbiad (1807). But in both style and spirit these poems 
were weakl}^ imitative of a school of English poetry already 
defunct. The curse of conventionality is over them. War- 
riors, for example, are never said to come to swords' points, 
but one hero on another "pours the tempest of resistless war." 
If the night is bright, the moon is ' 'sole empress on her silver 
throne"; if dark, a cloud "involves the moon and wraps the 
world in shade." Perhaps no American poem has aspired 
higher or fallen lower than The Columbiad^ which at the very 
outset challenges comparison with the Iliad and the Aeneid: 

" I sing the mariner who first unfurled 
An eastern banner o'er the western world, 
And taught mankind where future empires lay 
In these fair confines of descending day." 

And the poem proceeds, in ponderous fashion, to uphold juster 
ideas of honor than those of old Homer, whose existence, 
the author stoutly maintained, ' 'had proved one of the signal 
misfortunes of mankind." Barlow's purpose was good. 
" This," he declared, " is the moment in America to give such 
a direction to poetry, painting, and the other fine arts, that 
true and useful ideas of glory may be implanted in the minds 
of men." But the poetry was not good, and the minds of men 
refused to take kindly to such implanting. Epics have not 
flourished on American soil. 

There was, however, one American who before 1800 

produced poetry that can still be read for its own 

Freneau, Sake. This was Philip Freneau. Freneau was 

1752-1832. ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ York in 1752, of a family that had 

originally been French Protestant refugees. He was gradu- 



46 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 

ated from Princeton several years before the outbreak of 
the Revolutionary War and immediately entered upon an 
active and varied career, becoming journalist, editor, trader, 
sea-captain, and government clerk l)y turns. His voyages 
took him to the Madeiras and the West Indies ; and at one 
time he suffered the horrors of imprisonment on a British 
prison-ship at New York. He was still a hale man of 
eighty when, having set out one December evening to walk to 
his home, about two miles from Monmouth, New Jersey, he 
lost his way in a violent snow-storm and perished. 

Freneau was best known in his own day as a •• patriot 
poet," having contributed to the newspapers, especially during 
the war, numerous occasional verses inspired by his hatred of 
the British and the royalists. The character of these, as of a 
whole flood of similar verse of the time, may be judged from 
the opening lines of ^-1 Propliecy (1782): 

" When a certain great king, whose initial is G, 
Shall force stamps upon paper and folks to drink tea; 
When these folks burn his tea and stampt paper like sfubble, 
You may guess that this king is then coming to trouble. 

But when B and C with their armies are taken, 
This king will do well if he saves his own bacon. 
In the year seventeen hundred and eighty and two, 
A stroke he shall get that will make him look blue; 
In the years eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five, 
You hardly shall know that the king is alive; 
In the year eighty-six the affair will be over, 
And he shall eat turnips that grow in Hanover." 

These verses, though rather above the average of the age, 
are still only such as we might expect from a man of Freneau" s 
restless and adventuresome spirit, and were probably written 
with a galloping pen. They have long since become obsolete. 
But in calmer moods Freneau produced work of more lasting 
qualities. A few of his poems deal with native American 



POETRY 47 

scenes and themes, and two or three among these, such as 
Eiitaio /Springs* and The Indian Burying- Ground ^ are usually 
selected as examples of his poetic genius at its best. Scott 
gave testimony to his appreciation of the former by adopting, 
with a slight change, one of its lines for his Marmion (Introduc- 
tion to Canto III.), — 

*' And took the spear, but left the shield;" 
while Campbell borrowed for his O'Connors Child the fine 
fancy at the close of the following stanza from The Indian 
Burying- Ground: 

** By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, 
In vestments for the chase arrayed. 
The hunter still the deer pursues, 
The hunter and the deer— a shade." 

Freneau's most ambitious poem is The House of JSfight, 
written while he was in Jamaica, at the age of twenty-four. It 
is grimly imaginative, and possibly, in places, foreshadows the 
genius of Poe, but it is a very uneven production and has been 
overpraised. Far better is the little lyric of four stanzas, The 
Wild Honey suclde {Poems, 1795), in which this native flower is 
apostrophized in all its modest, evanescent beauty: 

" Fair flower, that dost so comely grow, 
Hid in this silent, dull retreat, 
Untouched thy honeyed blossoms blow, 

Unseen thy little branches greet; 
No roving foot shall find thee here, 
No busy hand provoke a tear. 

'* From morning suns and evening dews 
At first thy little being came; 
If nothing once, you nothing lose, 

For when you die you are the same; 
The space between is but an hour, 
The frail duration of a flower." 

* Freneau's title was " To the Memory of the Brave Americans, under General 
Greene, who Fell in the Action of September 8, 1781." 



48 THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 

Most critics have cared to remember of Freneau only this 
one lyric, but he essayed another and rather more difficult kind 
of verse "svith such success that it should not be overlooked. 
This is ''social verse," — a somewhat inexact and general term 
for various kinds of sentimental effusions that are light without 
levity and grave without gravity, that, in other words, range 
freely all the way from laughter to tears without quite touch- 
ing upon either. Freneau could write a most pathetic tribute 
To the Dog SancJio who nearly lost his life defending his mas- 
ter's cabin against midnight robbers; or he could compose a 
graceful ditty on A Lady's Singing Bird, or on Peicter Platter 
Alley; but his best efforts in this direction are distinctly 
bacchanalian, celebrating the praises of wine and the joys 
of tavern life. The Parting Glass, On the Ruins of a Country 
Inn, To a Honey Bee, are poems that should not be allowed to 
drop out of our anthologies, all the more because we have so 
few of the kind. The last named is especially happy. The 
tippler addresses a wandering bee that has alighted on his 
glass: 

*'T\"elcome !— I hail you to my glass; 
All welcome here you find; 
Here let the cloud of trouble pass, 
Here be all care resigned. 

This fluid never fails to please, 

And drown the griefs of men or bees." 

But the bee finally succeeds in drowning itself as well as i:;3 
griefs : 

"Do as you please, your will is mine; 
Enjoy it without fear, 
And your grave will be this glass of wine, 
Your epitaph — a tear. 

Go, take your seat in Charon's boat; 
"V\>'11 tell the hive, you died afloat." 

William Clifton, a young Philadelphian of promise who 



POETRY 49 

died in 1799, also produced a few occasional poems, which 
, were published in 1800, the best one of which 

Occasional — a bit of melodious social verse with the refrain 
Verse. ^£ "Friendship, Love, Wine, -and a Song" — scarcely 

suffers by comparison with the lyrics of Freneau. And in 
1780, while the result of the Revolution still hung in the 
balance, there appeared an anonymous drinking song with 
a strong patriotic ring. The Volunteer Boys, of which it seems 
worth while to preserve still an echo, if only that we may catch 
at this distance a little of the spirit of our forefathers : 

''Hence with the lover who sighs o'er his wine, 
Chloes and Phillises toasting; 
Hence with the slave who will whimper and whine, 
Of ardour and constancy boasting; 
Hence with love's joys, 
Follies and noise, — 
The toast that I give is the Volunteer Boys." 

From this time on the echoes of the Revolution grew 
rapidly more and more faint, and though they did not cease 
until well into the next century, we shall find, when we take 
up the thread of poetry again, that the character of the poetry 
was materially changed. 



PART II 

THE CREATIVE IMPULSE 

FEOM MAINE TO GEOEGIA 
1800-1860 



51 



Independence was won. A federal constitution had been 
adopted and a government organized under its provisions. By 
the beginning of the nineteenth century the capital had been 
permanently fixed at Washington, a second president had 
quietly given way to a third of a different party, and the United 
States were a political fact to be reckoned with in the councils of 
nations. It remained for them to prove themselves worthy of 
the position they held, and to carry on in America the work of 
European ci\alization and culture. Foreign trade existed of 
course — in ten years the exports had increased from twenty 
to seventj^ millions of dollars; here and there, too, a man 
of an investigating and inventive turn of mind, like Ben- 
jamin Franklin, had contributed something to the practical 
knowledge of mankind; but in that higher kind of commerce of 
which trade reviews and public records take little note, the New 
World had as yet given really nothing in exchange for what it 
received. Would it ever have anything to give? European 
critics of art and literature dared to ask the question, for it was 
the common belief in Europe that, as Irving humorously put 
it, ' • all animals degenerated in America, and man among the 
number." 

The answer to their question did not come at once — it is 
not even yet such as we should like to make — but it came. 
The cause of popular education, so cherished by the Americans 
from the first, was taken up with new zeal. Noah Webster's 
famous Speller appeared in 1783, Lindley Murray's English 
Grammar in 1795, and Webster's Compendious Dictionary in 
1806. And in literature proper, the creative impulse was 
plainly asserting itself. From the beginning of the century, 
when Charles Brockden Brown of Philadelphia deliberately 

53 



54 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

took up the profession of letters, there was a conscious awaken- 
ing of literary activity. The manifestations of that activity 
were most marked in New York, and that city, within ten 
years, had among her ninety thousand inhabitants an author 
— Irving — who was destined to win for American letters some 
recognition in the literary circles of Europe. 

Still, progress was slow. For after the decade that passed 
between Brown's first novel in 1798 and Irving's Knickerbocker 
History in 1809, it was almost another decade before there was 
anything worth adding to the record. Then, in 1817, came 
Brj'ant's Thanatopsis; in 1818, Paulding's Backwoodsman; in 
1819, the poems of Drake and Halleck; in 1819, 1820, Irving's 
JSketch-Book; in 1821, Cooper's Spy. Ten years more found 
some of these writers distinguished. In 1832 Bryant, then 
editor of the New York Evening Post, was bringing out his 
second volume of poems, Cooper's tales were being widely 
translated in Europe, and Irving was at length come back from 
his seventeen years' residence abroad to receive the highest 
honors from his countrymen. By that time, too, Longfellow, 
Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell were 
either appearing or soon to appear above the literary horizon. 
Another thirty years and the United States had a respectable 
body of national literature, that body of literature which, as 
we said at the outset, has now became classic. 

"We need not deceive ourselves as to its relative im- 
portance. America has no world-names, no literature or art 
that are secure in the sense in which Plato and Shakespeare, 
the Iliad and the Song of Solomon, the Parthenon and the 
Laokoon, are secure. But the United States have built up a 
nationality through years of trial and heroic endeavor, and 
have brought forth men spiritually gifted to tell the story. It 
is the record of those years, sixty or seventy roundly speaking, 
years in which, said Cooper, the nation was passing from the 
gristle into the bone, that we now purpose to review in detail. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE NEW ENVIEONMENT. BROWN, IRVING, COOPER, 

BRYANT 

To the inhabitants of the United States of one hundred 
years ago, the New World was in some respects quite as old as 
it is to us. It had always been their home and their fathers' 
home. It had a continuous history of two hundred 3^ears, and 
the Pilgrim Fathers were as remote to Irving and Bryant as 
Cotton Mather is to us — that is, if we measure by time alone. 
But if we measure by achievements, we must alter our per- 
spective. In its unexplored area, its untamed natives, its 
undeveloped resources, the country was still new, and it was 
consciously so. It w^as consciously new, too, in its dearth of 
art and literature. The ocean and the wilderness, the motley- 
peopled sea-ports, the vast inland lakes, the pine forests, the 
stubborn New England soil and climate, the little log school- 
house, the quaint Dutch burgher, the southern planter, the 
prowling Indian, were all accepted in a matter-of-fact spirit, 
and scarcely a poet or painter had looked upon them yet with 
an imaginative eye. Two centuries of the primitive, heroic age 
of America had already passed, and there was no epic song. 
But at last, in the peace of established nationhood, the new 
environment, so fast becoming old, was yielding its inspiration 
to native art. 

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, 1771-1810 

Philip Freneau failed to follow up worthily in days of 
peace the gift which he had exercised in more eventful times, 
and as he had no contemporary of similar gifts, poetry lay 

55 



56 THE XEW ENVIROKMEXT 

dormant. The new impulse was to be felt first in prose, — 
as it chanced, in prose fiction, a form of art that was being 
rapidly developed in England. That novels had been in free 
circulation in America for some time is attested by Noah 
Webster, who. in an essay on woman's education, written about 
1790, complained that '-a hundred volumes of modern novels 
may be read without acquiring a new idea. " They must have 
been the products of English pens. Of American writers in this 
field during the eighteenth century, one might almost say that 
the names of but two are remembered — Mrs. Susanna Rowson 
and Mrs. Tabitha Tenney; and their numerous novels may be 
dismissed as unworthy of record, though one of Mrs. Rowson's. 
Charlotte Temple, a crude hysterical production published in 
1790 (declared, by the way, to be '-a tale of truth"), may still 
be found in pamphlet issues and doubtless has still some power 
of drawing tears. The year 1798, however, marked the advent 
of a romancer of somewhat more than passing worth — Charles 
Brockden Brown. 

Brown was bom at Philadelphia in 1771 and died there in 
1810. Sickly in body from childhood, he somewhat illogically 
determined to devote his energy to the cultivation 
of his mind. He became a diligent student of 
language and literature, laboring to make himself a master of 
style, and, after some dallying with the law, adopted the 
profession of letters outright — the first man in America to 
take such a step and succeed well enough to be remembered 
for it. Though he came of a Quaker family, he held very 
liberal views: his first publication, Alcuiii (1797), was a dialogue 
on the rights of women. His sensitive and imaginative tem- 
perament was one to respond quickly to the extravagances of 
the age, and it was an age of revolutionary ardors and aspira- 
tions, an age which produced Shelleys and • -iridescent dreams." 
Browns nature, however, was not long in finding the proper field 
of its activity in fiction. In the brief space of four years, from 



BROCKDEN BROWN 57 

1798 to 1801, he published six novels, or romances,^ of con- 
siderable length. But with this outburst his creative power 
seems to have exhausted itself, for he devoted the remainder 
of his short life to journalism. 

Brown had much talent and some of the marks of 

genius, and there can be little doubt that, if he had lived at 

a later period in the development of fiction and had 

(Procter of i^ggjj given a stronger constitution, he would have 

his JVorks. ^ & ' 

produced work of a high order. As it is, his Wieland, 

Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, and the rest, can command only a 

qualified praise. Their strength is great, but their weakness is 

greater, and while there will always be some to read them with an 

interest mounting to absorption, most people will be repelled by 

the sheer horror of their themes and their grave ofl^ences 

against art. To begin with, they are written in a strange 

style, at once nervous and stilted. The sentences are short, 

hammering, and monotonous, — quite unlike the elaborate and 

carefully modulated sentences affected by the political orators 

and essayists of the time. The phrases, on the contrary, are 

roundabout, and the words are the same long Latin derivatives 

that the lawyers and the statesmen loved to roll under their 

tongues. The result is a peculiar compound of abruptness and 

formalism. For example, the first three paragraphs of Wieland 

open thus : ' 'I feel little reluctance in complying with your 



*It is well to use these names carefully. Fiction is a general term for 
imaginative prose. 7"ale is an old word, once applied to almost any kind of 
story, true or false. It is now chiefly limited to stories of adventure, stories in 
which the interest lies in the events. A romance is a kind of elaborated and 
heightened tale, drawing its interest largely from the picturesque, the marvel- 
lous, the supernatural. The novel, of later development, aims to keep more closely 
to actual or possible life, and to portray character as affecting or affected by 
circumstances. The short story corresponds to the novel somewhat as the tale 
does to the romance, in being less elaborate. All the terms overlap, however, 
tale and romance in particular being still often used interchangeably; and even 
though we l<eep the definitions distinct, any particular story is likely to have 
characteristics of both tale and romance, or of both romance and novel. Brown's 
stories may very properly be called either romances or novels. 



58 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

request' ' — ' 'My state is not destitute of tranquillity" — ' 'I address 
no supplication to the Deity." Modern prose would prefer to 
say : ' '1 am quite willing to do as you wish" — ' 'I have moments 
of peace" — "I make no prayers to God." In another place 
the revival of hope is described as ' 'the re-exaltation of that 
luminary of whose effulgencies I had so long and so liberally 
partaken. ' ' Certainly no critic in Brown's day would have found 
this style offensive, and the poet Shelle}^, it may be said, read 
the tales with eagerness ; but it is impossible for readers to-day 
not to be very differently moved. 

The same thing is true of the exaggerated sentimentalism 
of the tales. Sentimentalism was characteristic of the fiction 
just then popular in England, from Mackenzie's 3Ian of Feeling 
to Grodwin's Caleb Williams, the most widely read novel of the 
time. Brown revels in situations that call for display of feel- 
ing, especially of the so-called tender emotions; and such 
phrases as "extreme sensibility," "impressionable nature," 
"tears of delicious sympathy," "agony of fondness," "effusions 
of gratitude," "paroxysms of grief," sprinkle his pages. 

But the most striking feature of the stories is the machinery 
of mystery and terror which supports the plot. This, too, had 
its English model in the "Grothic" romances of the time, of 
which Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto and Mrs. Badcliffe's 
Mysteries of UdoljjJio are famous examples. Secret passages, 
sliding panels, unearthly voices, midnight murders, and vanish- 
ing trails tend to keep the reader in a creepy state of body 
and mind. Of course these are good romantic devices; only 
Brown, true to his "advanced" ideas, would not allow them to 
stand frankly on their emotional and artistic value. He felt 
obliged to support every fancy by a fact, attested in a foot- 
note if need be, and to find a natural explanation for his 
wildest absurdities. Thus he drags in the phenomena of sleep- 
walking, mental hallucination, and the like. The effect is not 
what he calculated, for his plots are made only the more absurd 



BROCKDEN BROWN 59 

and trhial. He failed to understand that the imagination will 
accept the impossible but resents the improbable. Thus by 
straining probability and allowing momentous events to turn 
upon light causes, he weakens the reader's interest and makes 
him critical. In Wleland, for example, Theodore Wieland, a 
religious fanatic, murders his wife and children at the bidding 
of certain "divine voices." The voices turn out to be merely 
the trick of a scoundrelly ventriloquist. That such a thing 
might happen, no one will deny, but it is extremely improb- 
able ; and if it did happen, we should expect to find the account 
of it among the items of a sensational newspaper, and not in a 
romance w^ritten for our edification. 

It is impossible to illustrate these things fully here, but 
some idea of Brown's style, as well as of his predilection for 
gruesome themes, may be obtained from the following extract. 
It is the beginning of the famous description, in Arthur Mervyn, 
of the j^'ellow fever epidemic at Philadelphia in 1793, which he 
himself had witnessed and suffered from : 

"The sun had nearly set before I reached the precincts of the 
city. I pursued the track which I had formerly taken, and entered 
High Street after nightfall. Instead of equipages and a throng of 
passengers, the voice of levity and glee, which I had formerly 
observed, and which the mildness of the season would, at other times, 
have produced, I found nothing but a dreary solitude. 

**The market-place, and each side of this magnificent avenue, 
were illuminated, as before, by lamps; but between the verge of 
Schuylkill and the heart of the city I met not more than a dozen 
figures; and these were ghostlike, wrapped in cloaks, from behind 
which they cast upon me glances of wonder and suspicion, and, as I 
approached, changed their course, to avoid touching me. Their 
clothes were sprinkled with vinegar, and their nostrils defended from 
contagion by some powerful perfume. 

" I cast a look upon the houses, which I recollected to have form- 
erly been, at this hour, brilliant with lights, resounding with lively 
voices, and thronged with busy faces. Now they were closed, above 
and below; dark, and without tokens of being inhabited. From the 



60 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

upper windows of some, a gleam sometimes fell upon the pavement 1 
was traversing, and showed that their tenants had not fled, but were 
secluded or disabled. 

" These tokens were new, and awakened all my panics. Death 
seemed to hover over this scene, and I dreaded that the floating pes- 
tilence had already lighted on my frame," 

This is excellent in its kind, and the audacious realism of 
the passages that follow fairly takes one's breath, almost 
challenging comparison with similar passages in Boccaccio, 
Manzoni, or Defoe. But the kind is morbid, even though the 
artist's hand is strong enough to keep him clear of the hys- 
terical. And in the case of Brown's work the psychological 
analysis that attends it all makes the matter worse. There is 
endless deliberation without action, wearisome pausing to 
portray every slightest phase of every fleeting sensation. 
Nor is there any touch of humor to relieve the prevailing 
gloom. 

One thing in this work is to be praised without reserve. 
Notwithstanding his adherence to the methods of the British 
novelists. Brown had the courage to give his stories always a 
New World background, now the city of Philadelphia or of 
Baltimore, now the wilds of the Pennsylvania forests. The 
suburban villas with their avenues of catalpas, the settler's 
clay-plastered log cabin and square acre of clearing tilled 
with the hoe, the panther in his cave, the Indian with his 
tomahawk, — these are li"\ang pictures out of a century 
that is gone and are worth many volumes of sentimental 
scenes. Here indeed Brown was a pioneer, and in this 
reliance upon local color he anticipates Cooper, just as in 
psychological analysis he anticipates Poe and Hawthorne, and 
in unshrinking realism the writers of a modern French school. 
For the rest, his romances are instructive more as examples of 
what other romancers should avoid than of what they should 
imitate. He did not have Scott or Hawthorne to teach him. 



MINOR EARLY FICTION 61 

He belonged to the experimental period of English fiction, and 
he suffered the common fate that attends early experiments. 

MINOR EARLY FICTION 

Brown's early devotion to romantic fiction was shortlived, 
and he does not seem to have communicated the impulse, 
genuine as it was, to any worthy contemporary or successor. 
His only contemporaries, indeed, were such as the negligible 
Mrs. Rowson and Mrs. Tenney afore-mentioned ; and those who 
followed him after an interval of nearly twenty years were, 
with the shining exceptions of Irving and Cooper, little more 
important. Yet a few of these latter need mention. 

John Neal, of Maine, began in 1817 a long and industrious 
literary career, and his scores of novels {Logan ^ 1821; Seventy - 
Six, 1822; The Boion-Fasters, 1833) portray in a 
ngs^if-e ' vigorous, if somewhat erratic fashion, certain 
phases of American life. But Neal, who boasted 
of writing three volumes in twenty-seven days, ' ' did not 
pretend to write English," and though Hawthorne could enjoy 
the "ranting stuff" in his youth, literature takes little account 
of it. Farther south, amid the picturesque Berkshire hills of 
Massachusetts, once the scene of Jonathan Edwards's mis- 
sionary labors among the Indians, Miss Sedgwick, a 
Maria school-teacher, made a similar but more successful 

sedgivick, effort toward creating a native fiction, weaving 

1789-1867. 1 T 1 T. -, . . . 

her local surroundings and remmiscences into 
two-volume novels that had considerable vogue in their day. 
A New England Tale (1822), Redwood (1824), Hope Leslie 
(1827), and The Linwoods (1835), are at once sermons on the 
moral and domestic virtues, and faithful pictures of New Eng- 
land homestead life in the days when the Mohawk was still a 
menace to the white man's security. 

A more important figure than either of the preceding was 



62 THE NEW EXVIRONMENT 

James Kirke Paulding, who belonged to the region of the Dutch 
James Kiru Settlements about New York and who was himself 
Paulding, probably a descendant of a Dutch family. A city 

T779—1860 

politician and "man about town," he had a 
facile pen and spent much of its energy in satire of one 
kind or another, now growing witty or caustic over the 
relations between John Bull and Brother Jonathan (1812), 
now parodying Scott {The Lay of the Scottish Fiddle, 1813), 
and now burlesquing Cooper. His earliest work consisted of 
contributions to the Salmagundi papers (1807), in the publica- 
tion of which he was associated with his friends, the Irving 
brothers, and of which he published a second series by himself 
(1819, 1820). His best work, however, is to be sought in 
his more serious pictures of American life and manners, and 
though his Backwoodsman (1818), a poem of three thousand 
lines, was not successful, such two-volume novels as Konings- 
marke, the Long Finne {1S23), The Butchman's Fireside (1831), 
and Westward Ho! (1832) were. The first of these deals with 
the Swedish settlements on the Delaware, the second with the 
Dutch residents along the Hudson, and the third with life in 
Virginia and Kentucky. But to say that the novels were 
successful is not to give them high praise. Their crudity 
may be judged from a single sentence in The Dutchman s 
Fireside, in which the author, after picturing the overturning 
of a boat- load of picnickers in the middle of a stream, naively 
tries to soften the pain which he feels obliged to cause his 
readers: "It is with sorrowful emotions I record that the acci- 
dent was fatal to two of the innocent girls and one of the young 
men, who sat in the bow of the boat." The characters are 
often caricatures, the humor is heavy, the pathos is overdrawn, 
and the author's constant preaching against the vices of an age 
of machinery and money-getting and extravagance is inappro- 
priate and tedious. Yet the books are not wholly unreadable, 
and for their lively pictures of the Dutchman's fireside or the 



MINOR EARLY FICTION 63 

red man's lodge they deserve a humble place by the works of 
Irving and Cooper. 

To complete this brief survey of a fiction that at the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century seemed to be exploiting the 
entire country almost as persistently as it is doing 
Pendleton to-day, the name of John Pendleton Kennedy of 
mTlZ^ Baltimore may be added. Kennedy, like Paulding, 
was a public man. He served several terms in 
Congress, and late in life was appointed, as Paulding had been 
before him, Secretary of the Navy. Nor were his writings 
unlike those of his northern contemporary. His earliest literary 
venture was the Red Booh (1818), a society serial similar to 
Salmagundi, published in association with another Baltimorean. 
Later, he turned to fiction, and in 1832 published Swallow Barn, 
his best known work. Its plot is slight; it is valuable chiefly 
as a collection of sketches of manorial life in Virginia, of the 
easy-going days and ways at Swallow Barn, ''an aristocratical 
old edifice that squats, like a brooding hen, on the southern 
bank of the James River." The style, in grace and genial 
humor, reminds one of Irving, to whom the book was dedi- 
cated. In his other works. Horse- Shoe Rohinson, a Tale of 
the Tory Ascendency (1835), and Roh of the Bowl (1838), the 
author went back to revolutionary and colonial times, still lay- 
ing the scenes in the South. It has sometimes been said that 
Kennedy wrote the fourth chapter of the second volume of 
Thackeray's Virginians, but it seems more probable that he 
only furnished Thackeray with some material of a local char- 
acter which Thackeray's knowledge did not enable him to 
supply himself. 

Such are a few of the books that from 1815 onward were 
published and advertised by the side of Ir^ing's and Cooper's. 
But the years have covered them with increasing neglect, and 
we must turn to the works of the latter writers for the only 
permanent record of the romantic tendencies of the generation 
before Poe and Hawthorne. 



64 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

WASHING TON IR VING, 1783-1859 

It seems eminently fitting that Irving, the oft-styled 
"Father of American Letters,"— a very human, genial father, 
too, like old Chaucer himself, — should have borne the name 
of him who, by a clearer title, was called the ' 'Father of his 
Country." He was born at New York in 1783, the year of the 
treaty of peace. "Washington's work is ended," said his 
mother; "the child shall be named after him." And the child 
received at a later day the great man's blessing and lived to be 
his biographer. 

New York had then fewer than thirty thousand inhabitants 
and was still second to Philadelphia. It was comparatively 
easy for the city boy to get into the country and 
thus to see all sides of American life — commerce 
and agriculture, art and nature, society and solitude. 
Irving himself has told us of delightful holiday afternoon 
rambles, and of long excursions up the Hudson, squirrel- 
shooting and angling in the Sleepy Hollow region or drift- 
ing lazily past the Catskills. The love of the open air and 
of the picturesque always clung to him, and in one of his 
essays on England he declares that fondness for rural life 
has had a most healthful effect upon the English national 
character. Still he was essentially a city boy, with a city 
boy's tastes and habits. He lounged about the pier-heads, or 
snatched eagerly at chances to attend the theatre. If he was 
fond of visiting the scenes of murders and robberies, we must 
attribute it in part to his surroundings and in part to his active 
imagination; there could have been no morbid or depraved 
instinct back of it, for with all his mischievousness he had a 
noble and gentle disposition. 

In the large, family of eleven children, of whom he was the 
youngest, his social nature was fully developed, and as he grew 
up he took more and more delight in social intercourse. He 
entered a law oflSce, but its regular routine had few charms for 






AVILLIAM CtTLLElSr BRYAJSTX 
CHARLES BROCKDEISr BROWN 



JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 
WASHXNGXOIsr IRVHSTG 



IRVING 65 

Mm. Instead of reading law he read literature, and he was 
glad at all times to escape to the clubs, the theatres, and the 
drawing-rooms, where his observations furnished him matter 
for the exercise of his pen in social sketches and satirical 
squibs to be printed in his brother Peter's morning newspaper. 
This very unacademic education received a proper finishing 
touch when, in 1804, his brothers sent him to Europe. 

Thereby was revealed another marked trait. He went 
to Europe in the first instance for his health, and he went 
again later, he tells us, to see great men, though that is 
half a humorous fling at European contempt of America. But 
it is clear that a chief attraction was always the charm of 
Europe's "storied and poetical association." The romantic 
spirit was strong in him and it early took the form of a love of 
mediaeval history and tradition. ' 'My native country was full 
of youthful promise: Europe was rich in the accumulated 
treasures of age." And even as he sailed up the river Mersey, 
he was thrilled by catching sight, through a telescope, of ' 'the 
mouldering ruin of an abbey overrun with ivy." 

His first sojourn in Europe lasted nearly two years. He 

returned to brighten the society of New York with his many 

personal charms, to which were now added health 

^^'!j( and the polish of travel. For a year he was 

Writings. ^ "^ 

associated with his eldest brother, William, 
and William's brother-in-law, James Kirke Paulding, in the 
publication of a semi-monthly periodical. Salmagundi^ model- 
led, as such literary enterprises were wont to be, after the 
Spectator. He seemed to be aware by this time of his propen- 
sity toward writing, but as literature was not a promising 
profession for an American, he persisted, half-heartedly, in 
looking toward the law and politics. However, he was soon 
engaged in another literary enterprise. With his brother 
Peter he had planned to write a burlesque history of 
New York as a parody upon Dr. Samuel Mitchill's pedantic 



66 THE NEW ENVIROXMEXT 

Picture of Xew l^orJc, just then pubiished, when Peter was 
suddenly called to Europe and the work was left in the hands 
of Washington. He changed the scope of it at once, condens- 
ing the parod}' into five introductory chapters and continuing 
the work as a chronicle, truthful in outline but still burlesque 
in spirit, of the settlement of Xew York by the Dutch, and of 
the reigns of the early Dutch governors. The work purported 
to have been written by an eccentric Dutch antiquary, and 
after some hoaxing notices in the newspaper of the mysterious 
disappearance of the author and the discovery of his manu- 
script, it was published in December, 1809, as A History of 
New Yorlx, hy Diedrich Knickerbocker. 

No one could have been more surprised than Irving at the 
success of this "haphazard production" — a success which was 
''Kn' k both immediate and lasting. His modesty was quite 

hocker overwhelmed with the attentions he received. He 

History. j^^^-^ furnished readers with an inexhaustible fund 

of wonder and amusement, he had given America a genuine 
American book, he had shown New York that she had a history 
and traditions, and he had fixed a character and a name upon a 
quaint but worthy and influential element of New World society. 
True, all this was not done without offence. Some of the more 
prosaic of his readers of Dutch descent could not enter at 
once into the humor of the thing, and were disposed to 
resentment. But they were defenceless, and moreover 
Irving had written so wholly without malice that the 
feeling speedily wore away. The Dutch families became 
actually proud to acknowledge themselves Knickerbockers. 
Irving has a good-natured allusion to this in the preface 
to "Kip Yan Winkle," wherein he says that the good 
Diedrich was ' 'apt to ride his hobby his own way, and though 
it did now and then kick up the dust a little in the eyes, 
of his neighbors, yet his errors and follies are remembered 
'more in sorrow than in anger." " Indeed, he declared, it was 
beginnino; to seem that Diedrich had some chance for immor- 



IRVING. 67 

tality, inasmuch as certain biscuit-makers were imprinting his 
likeness on their New- Year calces. 

In that same preface, Irving says whimsically of the liter- 
ary character of the Knicherhockcr Ilisfort/ that it is "not a 
whit better than it should be," adding with mock gravity that 
"its chief merit is its scrupulous accuracy, and it is now 
admitted into all historical collections as a book of unques- 
tionable authority." Of course, the humor of the book is its 
first great quality — a humor of almost epic proportions, extend- 
ing from mere quips and puns and trivial colloquialisms, 
such as "jumping out of one's skin" and "keeping up 
the raw," to the entire conception of the "Dutch dynasty" 
as a momentous era in the world's history, with its wars, 
its councils, its successions, its downfall and extinction. 
We read here of how the benevolent inhabitants of Europe 
introduced among the savages rum, gin, brandy, and the other 
comforts of life, of how the town of New Amsterdam arose 
out of mud, of the direful feud between Ten Breeches and 
Tough Breeches, of the Pipe Plot, of the Mosquito War, of 
the renowned Wouter van Twiller, who was exactly five feet 
six inches in height and six feet five inches in circumference, 
of his unparalleled virtues and literally unutterable wisdom, of 
how he fell into a profound doubt and finally evaporated, of 
how William the Testy grew tough in proportion as he dried, 
and of the dignified retirement and mortal surrender of Peter 
the Headstrong. The humor is of the hearty, reckless kind 
that sometimes oversteps the line of good taste, though that 
particular phase of it did not seem to give any offence to con- 
temporary readers. Walter Scott discovered the book and 
relates how he spent several evenings reading it aloud until he 
and his guests were "sore with laughter." He did it the high 
honor of comparing it with the works of Dean Swift and of 
Laurence Sterne. 

But there is another side to the merit of the book, and one 



68 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

which later in life Irving felt moved to insist upon. He would 

have the book read, not merely as humor, but as in some sense 
poetry, that is to say. as a work of the romantic and creative 
imagination. He had intended, in this amusing form, he said, 
to embody the traditions and customs of his native city, "to 
clothe home scenes and places and familiar names with those 
imaginative and whimsical associations so seldom met with in 
our new country, but which live like charms and spells about 
the cities of the old world, binding the heart of the native 
inhabitant to his home." How well he succeeded was 
attested by the swarm of investigators who followed him 
and, as he expressed it, almost crowded him off the 
legendary ground he had been the first to explore. But 
no investigator can rob us of this legendary and now 
enchanted field. It was Irving's triumph that he re-created 
this past and yet left it, to the imagination, even more 
remotely past than ever, a fairy realm of antiquity safe from 
the desecration of the mere historian. The smoke of the 
burghers' pipes hangs like a haze over the picture, softening, 
yet leaving plainly discernible all the essential features, — 
the luxuriant cabbage-gardens, the brick-gabled houses, the 
women's quilted calico caps and short, spreading petticoats, 
the men's brass buttons and eel-skin queues. 

"Ah, blissful and never-to-be-forgotten age! when everything 
was better than it has ever been since, or ever will be again, when 
Buttermilk Channel was quite dry at low water, when the shad in 
the Hudson were all salmon, . . . when as yet New Amsterdam was 
a mere pastoral town, shrouded in groves of sycamores and willows, 
and surrounded by trackless forests and wide-spreading waters, that 
seemed to shut out all the cares and vanities of a wicked world." 

Notwithstanding the success of the Knickerhocker History^ 

Irving did not yet decide for a literary career. 

Jf^''* The book, like many another masterpiece of 

humor, had been written or at least finished, 

in the midst of profound personal grief. Matilda Hoffman, a 



IRVING 69 

girl of seventeen, to whom Irving was deeply attached, had 
suddenly died. The shock was one from which he recovered 
but slowly, perhaps never entirely; at any rate, partly owing to 
this and partly to other considerations, he remained throughout 
life unmarried. In 1815 he went again to Europe, for a short 
visit, in the interests of his brothers' hardware and cutlery 
business, in which he was a rather inactive partner. The 
visit, as it chanced, lasted seventeen years. The first five 
years of this period were spent in England. The mercantile 
enterprise failed, and Irving was once more adrift. Scott 
would have assisted him to an editorship, but the old vagabond 
literary instincts were asserting themselves too strongly again 
to allow him to look with favor upon routine journalism. 
Clearly, it was to be literature at last, but literature and free- 
dom, not literature and drudgery and time-serving. 

He had been for some time revolving the plan of a volume 
of literary essays on divers subjects. Now, feeling the need 

of prompt publication, he sent off such papers as 
ssvi-cA- i^g j^^^ completed to America, where they were 

printed, and published simultaneously at New York, 
Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, as the JSketch-Book, 
written by "Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." This was in May, 1819. 
The first number contained the first five numbers of the work 
as we now have it, "Bip Van Winkle" being the most con- 
spicuous. Other numbers followed, the sixth containing 
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and the seventh (1820) closing 
the series. The whole was then published at London in two 
volumes, with Scott once more in the role of good angel. The 
early numbers had already attracted attention in England, and 
naturally enough ; for to a charm of personality and a finish of 
style scarcely excelled by the best English prose writers, they 
added a freshness of spirit, and occasionally of theme, that was 
quite un-English. Jeffrey, of the Edinhurgh Review^ who 
could have had no possible prejudice in favor of the book, gave 



70 THE NEW EXVIROXMEXT 

it a cordial welcome, — most cordial for Jeffrey. The gracious 
tone of the essays was well calculated to disarm criticism, the 
humor of several sketches was irresistible, and if the pathos of 
others was drawn in rather heavy lines, so much the better, for 
the age was sentimental. American literature was no longer 
a promise, but a fact. 

Irving took his success modestly — was even alarmed by it 
and feared that it could not last. But with the praises of 
Scott, Byron, and Moore, and the encouragement of his pub- 
lishers he could scarcely doubt long. At any rate he kept on, 
and in the intervals of travel on the continent he completed 
two more volumes — Bracehridge Hall in 1822, and Tales of a 
Traveller in 1824. They contained many excellent things, 
some, like "The Stout Gentleman" and "Dolph Heyliger," 
that have become fairly classic, but they were scarcel}' different 
enough from the Sketcli-Booh in either form or treatment to 
add anything to the author's reputation. In 1826 he went to 
Spain, drawn thither by the old magic of romantic associa- 
tions, and settled down to work of an historical nature. The 
chief results were the The Life and Voyages of Columbus (1828), 
the Conquest of Granada (1829), and the AJhamhra (1832). 

Ir\ing's historical works must not be judged by the tests we 
apply to-day. He had not scholarship in the modern sense, 
nor the philosophic mind, though neither was he seriously de- 
ficient in these qualities. His defect was really an excess — an 
excess of imagination and sympathy. He considered it the duty 
of a historian to be charitable, and he was prone to magnif}^ 
the deeds and the virtues of his heroes. Thus the Columbus 
is more delightful than trustworthy ; but it was so much better 
than an3^thing before it that its author shared with Hallam the 
honor of a gold medal from the British Royal Society of Lit- 
erature, and the book long and deservedly remained a standard 
biography. The Conquest of Granada, too, is an excellent 
work of its kind, and reads like a romance, which, in fact, it 
partly is. 



IRVING 71 

In the AlJmmhra, however, Irving once more escaped suffi- 
ciently from the thraldom of facts to be quite at home, and in 
this work he repeated the success of the Knickerhocker 
and the Sketch- Book. Prescott, indeed, called it the 
Spanish Sketch-Book, and the Spanish themselves have always 
regarded it as a kind of prose-poem. It is a happy mixture 
of fact and fancy, of history and legend, in which the old 
Moorish palace and fortress is removed as by a rod of enchant- 
ment from the material world and set in the realm of the imagina- 
tion, secure against deca5\ Moreover, in this book, Irving 
has done a peculiar service to Spain. For while he has taken 
great pains to be accurate, correcting certain fanciful concep- 
tions of the country and portrajing it for the stern, rugged, 
and even barren land that it is, he has yet enveloped it more 
inseparably than ever with the atmosphere of romance. Travel 
in Spain to one who has read Irving must be a very different 
thing from what it is to one who has not. It is just such a 
poet's service as Scott did for the Highlands of Scotland or 
Byron for the Isles of G-reece. 

"I tread haunted ground, and am surrounded by romantic asyo- 
ciations. From earliest boyhood, when, on the banks of the Hudson, 
I first pored over the pages of an old Spanish story about the wars of 
Granada, that city has ever been a subject of my waking dreams; and 
often have I trod in fancy the romantic halls of the Alhambra. Be- 
hold for once a day-dream realized; yet I can scarcely credit my 
senses, or believe that I do indeed inhabit the palace of Boabdil, and 
look down from its balconies upon chivalric Granada. As I loiter 
through the Oriental chambers, and hear the murmuring of fountains 
and the song of the nightingale; as I inhale the odor of the rose, .and 
feel the influence of the balmy climate, I am almost tempted to fancy 
myself in the Paradise of Mahomet, and that the plump little Dolores 
is one of the bright-eyed Houris, destined to administer to the hap- 
piness of true believers. 

"The peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace is its power of 
calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past, and thus cloth- 



72 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

ing naked realities with the ilhisions of the memory and the imagina- 
tion. As I delight to walk in these ' vain shadows,' I am prone to 
seek those parts of the Alhambra which are most favorable to this 
phantasmagoria of the mind; and none are more so than the Court 
of Lions, and its surrounding halls. Here the hand of time has 
fallen the lightest, and the traces of Moorish elegance and splendor 
exist in almost their original brilliancy. Earthquakes have shaken 
the foundations of this pile, and rent its rudest towers; yet see ! not 
one of those slender columns has been displaced, not an arch of that 
light and fragile colonnade has given way, and all the fairy fretwork 
of these domes, apparently as unsubstantial as the crystal fabrics of 
a morning's frost, yet exist after the lapse of centuries, almost as 
fresh as if from the hand of the Moslem artist. I write in the midst 
of these mementos of the past, in the fresh hour of early morning, in 
the fated Hall of the Abencerrages. The blood-stained fountain, the 
legendary monument of their massacre, is before me; the lofty jet 
almost casts its dew upon my paper. How difficult to reconcile the 
ancient tale of violence and blood with the gentle and peaceful scene 
around! Everything here appears calculated to inspire kind and 
happy feelings, for everything is delicate and beautiful. The very 
•light falls tenderly from above, through the lantern of a dome tinted 
and wrought as if by fairy hands. Through the ample and fretted 
arch of the portal I behold the Court of Lions, with brilliant sunshine 
gleaming along its colonnades and sparkling in its fountains. The 
lively swallow dives into the court, and then surging upwards, darts 
away twittering over the roofs; the busy bee toils humming among 
the flower-beds; and painted butterflies hover from plant to plant, 
and flutter up and sport with each other in the sunny air. It needs 
but a slight exertion of the fancy to picture some pensive beauty of 
the harem, loitering in these secluded haunts of Oriental luxury. 

*'He, however, who would behold this scene under an aspect 
more in unison with its fortunes, let him come when the shadows of 
evening temper the brightness of the court, and throw a gloom into 
the surrounding halls. Then nothing can be more serenely melan- 
choly, or more in harmony with the tale of departed grandeur. 

" At such times I am apt to seek the Hall of Justice, whose deep 
shadowy arcades extend across the upper end of the court. Here 
were performed, in presence of Ferdinand and Isabella and their tri- 
umphant court, the pompous ceremonies of high mass, ontakiug pos- 
session of the Alhambra. The very cross is still to be seen upon the 
wall, where the altar was erected, and where ofiiciated the Grand 



IRVING 73 

Cardinal of Spain, and others of the highest religious dignitaries of 
the land. I picture to myself the scene when this place was filled 
with the conquering host, that mixture of mitred prelate, and shorn 
monk, and steel-clad knight, and silken courtier; when crosses and 
crosiers and religious standards were mingled with proud armorial 
ensigns and the banners of the haughty chiefs of Spain, and flaunted 
in triumph through these Moslem halls. I picture to myself Colum- 
bus, the future discoverer of a world, taking his modest stand in a 
remote corner, the humble and neglected spectator of the pageant. 
I see in imagination the Catholic sovereigns prostrating themselves 
before the altar, and pouring forth thanks for their victory; while the 
vaults resound with sacred minstrelsy, and the deep-toned Te Deum. 
"The transient illusion is over — the pageant melts from the 
fancy — monarch, priest, and warrior return into oblivion with the 
poor Moslems over whom they exulted. The hall of their triumph 
is waste and desolate. The bat flits about its twilight vault, and the 
owl hoots from the neighboring tower of Comares." 

Irving had now produced three works, each of a high order 
in its kind — one of humor, one of description and sentiment, 

and one of romance. He was to write nothing 
Am^^ ^ greater than these, though many years of literary 

activity remained to him. Between 1829 and 1831 
he was in London again, as Secretary of Legation to the 
Court of St. James. In 1832 he was able to carry out 
the design he had for some time been cherishing of returning 
to America. Edward Everett, who reviewed the Alhamhra 
for the North American Review of that J^ear, took the 
occasion to congratulate both Irving and America, de- 
claring that Irving, by identifying his future fortunes with 
the United States, best consulted both his happiness and his 
permanent literary fame. There had been some foolish criti- 
cism of the author for remaining so long abroad and writing on 
foreign themes. But one of his temperament could not be 
blamed for finding in Old World society much that he really 
needed and could not get in the New. Besides, though the 
bulk of his Sketch-Book had a British inspiration, the best 



74 THE XEW ENVIRONMENT 

things in it were wholly American ; and what more fitting theme 

could an American in Spain have chosen than the life of 

Columbus? Irving was loj'al at heart, and the good sense of 

his countrymen knew it, and they applauded him to the echo 

when, at a public banquet at New York in his honor, he closed 

his speech with the declaration that he should remain here as 

long as he lived. 

Now in his fiftieth year and passing the prime of life, he 

was desirous of settling down in a home of his own. First, 

however, for the roving instinct was not yet dead, 

^ ^!' he wanted to see with his own eves something of the 

Works. «- ^ 

country that had grown so in his absence, and he 
embarked on a tour that took him through the forests and Indian 
mounds of Ohio west to the bufl^alo ranges of the upper Arkansas 
and south to New Orleans. Then he secured a picturesque spot 
at Tarrytown on the Hudson, not far from Sleepy Hollow, and 
began to remodel an old stone cottage into a ' ' snug little Dutch 
nookery, " which grew in time to the well-known Sunnyside, his 
home for the remainder of his life. Once he yielded to politi- 
cal pressure and accepted the post of Minister to Spain, spend- 
ing the four years from 18-42 to 1846 at Madrid. Apart from 
this, he passed his time almost exclusivel}' in literary work. A 
Tour on the Prairies appeared in 1835 as a part of Tlie Crayon 
Miscellany^ Astoria in 1836, The Adventures of Captain Bonne- 
ville in 1837, Oliver Goldsmith and Mahomet and His Successors 
in 1849, Wolferfs Roost in 1855, and Life of Washington in 
1855-1859. He had, it seems, even from boyhood, cherished 
the plan of writing a history of the conquest of Mexico, but 
when he learned that Prescott desired to undertake such a work, 
he magnanimously abandoned the field to him. Astoria was 
a semi-historical compilation, prepared in collaboration with 
his nephew, to celebrate the commercial enterprise of John 
Jacob Astor in establishing a colony at the mouth of 
the Columbia River. The biography of Goldsmith was a 



IRVING 75 

work which he was well qualified to write, for in temper- 
ament, in tastes, and in clearness and charm of literary style, 
he had much in common with the author of the Citizen of the 
World and the Vicar of Wakefield. The Life of Washington^ 
the life of the pioneer of freedom in America, was a most 
fitting task to crown the labors of the pioneer of American 
literature, who had told also the life-story of him who discov- 
ered the New World to the Old. 

Toward the close of the year which saw the publication of 
the fifth and final volume of the last named work, on November 
28, 1859, Irving died at his home on the Hudson. He was 
buried on a hill overlooking the river and a portion of the 
Sleepy Hollow valley. 

It is not at once easy to say which is the strongest among 

living's several titles to our praise. It has sometimes been the 

fashion to reo;ard the Knickerhocher History as his 
Summary ^ ^ 

and best work, and it is easy to understand the tempta- 

Estimate. tions which have led to such a judgment. The book 
was wholly American in its inspiration, it was written with mani- 
fest spontaneity and an almost reckless gaiety, its plan is highly 
original, its humor genuine and all-pervading, and it has a 
largeness of scope and wholeness of texture that were not 
always found in his writings. The fact remains, however, that 
the majority of his readers have taken the Sketch-Book most 
closely to heart, and perhaps they are right. The latter book 
is admittedly wanting in unity, but it makes up for that in 
variety; and while the stories of Kip Van Winkle, Ichabod 
Crane, and the Christmas Dinner may seem but trifles in ex- 
tent, they are not trifles when measured by the standards of 
literary art. Nor does it matter greatly that the whole series 
is in some sense the Spectator revived: the masters of English 
prose have never been so many as to make such revivals un- 
welcome. 

We may readily grant, indeed, that Irving's greatness did 




76 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

not lie in originality. He was not so well fitted to create a 
tradition as to perpetuate one or give it a new directicm. 
There was nothing revolutionar}' in his make-up; literature 
was good enough as he found it, and he preserved to the end a 
conservative, almost aristocratic ideal of its office. It is well, 
too, that he did so, since it was to be his task to force from 
English readers the first reluctant approval. Largely be- 
cause he was not revolutionary, he was admitted at once 
to their favor; his homely, sentimental, or medieval themes 
were entirely safe ones; and his style, formed upon familiar 
British models, found its audience prepared. At the same 
time, the American atmosphere lurked about it all, and so, 
almost imperceptibly, he bridged the gulf between the two 
nations and linked our literature to theirs. That this service 
was a great one is unquestionable. 

Of the sentimentalism which pervades so much of his work, 
little need be said in apology. Its influence has sometimes 
been bad; young admirers of Irving and his weak imitators 
have very often fallen into a stjde of effusive tenderness and 
namby-pamby moralizing that is anything l)ut agreeable. But 
for the man who would seek out the tomb of Petrarch's 
Laura, and grieve over the downfall of Napoleon, it seems 
only a natural and inoffensive self-expression. Irving is 
saved, indeed, from mawkishness, by his underlying manli- 
ness and sincerity and his fund of humor. The blend 
of sentiment and humor which made a perfect tale of the 
"Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was a blend native to the 
man. And after all, there is far more health than morbidness 
in his sentiment. It is impossible to read even those passages 
of the Sketch-Book which describe his voj'age across the ocean 
in search of health, without catching the infection of his 
energy and buoyant spirits. What a good thing it is to be 
alive, he seems to sa}' — what a busy, brilliant, bounteous 
world it is! Such a personalit}' as this was sure to make its 



COOPER 77 

way in the world of men, and, with the gift of a style as lucid 
and winning as itself, no less in the world of letters. 

Further characterization of his writings seems almost idle. 
They are very easily classified, since they require no profound 
study, offer no puzzles, and excite no hostility. Everybody 
reads them and likes them, and there the matter ends. They 
are works of the heart rather than of the head — gentle, human 
books, that belong on the same shelf with the writings of Addi- 
son and Groldsmith. If we desire to satisfy the hunger of the 
intellect, to be thrilled with a new hope, or to get solace for a 
lost faith, we do not go to Irving. He has little food and few 
stimulants, and no medicines save such as the wisest doctors 
always prescribe— fresh air and sunshine and a cheerful spirit. 
He is an entertainer for the idle hour, not a companion of the 
unsatisfied years. Yet, without being either a poet or a scholar, 
he goes so directly to all that is best in human nature that he 
wins for his admirers both poets and scholars, and at the same 
time that great audience of the uncritical that poets and 
scholars cannot always win. 

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 1789-1851 

In James Fenimore Cooper we have once more a romancer 
who approaches the novelist type, inviting comparison with 
Brockden Brown and his tardy successors. But Cooper stands 
out from the group of pioneer novelists in strong relief as the 
one man w^ho, to a thorough knowledge of primitive conditions 
on the frontier, added both a quick discernment of their romantic 
elements and the artist's power of broad and serious imagina- 
tive treatment. He lacked Brown's subtlety of mental analy- 
sis, but he was in every w^ay saner and wholesomer, with a 
stronger grasp upon the realities of life. Whatever he did was 
done in a large, free way; and Brown's Philadelphia scenes, 
Miss Sedgwick's pictures of New England home and school life, 
and the Dutch interiors of Paulding, pale before the sweeps of 
forest and ocean that fill the background of Cooper's canvas. 



78 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

This eminently befits the man whose father believed 
himself to have settled more acres than any other man in 
America, and who spent the first thirty-one years 
of his own life mostly out of doors, in unconscious 
preparation for the writing of the thirtj'-one yeavs to follow. 
He was born at Burlington, New Jersey, September 15, 
1789, the eleventh of twelve children. He was christened 
simply James, — Fenimore, the name of his mother, who 
was of Swedish descent, not being assumed until 1826. When 
he was but fourteen months old, his father, who had come into 
possession of large tracts of land about the head -waters of the 
Susquehanna in central New York, moved thither with his en- 
tire household. There, on the southeastern shore of Otsego 
Lake, had already been founded Cooperstown, and there, with- 
in a few years, was erected the large, baronial-like family man- 
sion, Otsego Hall — America's Abbotsford, it has sometimes 
been called — the home of Cooper's youth and of his later man- 
hood. It was the advance of civilization upon the wilderness. 
The charm of the region, to this da}^ remarkably picturesque, 
made a deep impression on the growing boy. The '^ beauteous 
valley" in the uplands, the lake that "lay imbedded in moun- 
tains of evergreen, with the long shadows of the pines on its 
surface," the "dark ribbon of water that gushed from the 
lake's outlet and wound its way toward the distant Chesa- 
peake," are all faithfully and lovingly described in the opening 
chapters of The Pioneers — a story in which it is easy to sub- 
stitute for Judge Marmaduke Temple of Templeton the name 
of Judge William Cooper of Cooperstown. In the settlement 
itself w^as a motley population — traders, trappers, and wood- 
cutters — gathered from all quarters of the globe; while to the 
north and west stretched the seemingly interminable forests of 
beech and maple, oak and pine, with their denizens of the 
wild deer, wolf, bear, and panther, and the scarcely less wild 
Indian. 



COOPER 79 

Cooper's schooling began at the village "Academy," was 
continued in the family of an English rector at Albany, and was 
concluded, though not completed, with three years at Yale. He 
entered Yale at the age of thirteen, but as he distinguished 
himself throughout his course more for mischief than for 
scholarship, he was dismissed without being allowed to gradu- 
ate. He was thus left, like most of the writers of the 
central and southern states, without the rigorous college 
training that fell, with the single exception of Whittier, 
to the lot of the New Englanders. But the young Cooper 
had little thought of becoming a professional man, and 
probably took his dismissal from Yale with a light heart, the 
more so as it resulted in securing for him an education better 
suited to his temperament. His father, who, as a Congres- 
sional representative and public man, would have some polit- 
ical influence, decided that he should fit himself for the 
navy, and, as a preliminary, the youth of seventeen shipped 
before the mast of a merchant vessel in the autumn of 1806. 
The year's voyage, which, fortunatelj^ in this case, was excep- 
tionally stormy, took him from New York to London, thence 
to Gibraltar, and by way again of London, back to Phila- 
delphia. His commission as midshipman in the navy promptly 
followed. He served for three years, OQcupied part of the 
time in building a brig on Lake Ontario, and part of the 
time in charge of the gunboats on Lake Champlain. After 
his marriage in 1811, he resigned his commission, and settled 
down to a happy domestic life, residing alternately near his old 
home in Otsego County, and near the home of his wife's parents 
in Westchester Countj^. He was engaged in the somewhat 
aimless occupations of a gentleman farmer, with no thought of 
duties or interests extending beyond his own household. But 
suddenly, after nine years of sheep-shearing and tree-planting, 
by what seems the merest freak of fancy he found himself 
launched on a literary career. 

It must have been in 1819 or 1820. He had been readins; 



80 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

an English society novel, and as he laid it aside he declared in 

disgust: "I could write a better story myself." 

First jje was challenged to do it, and the matter passed 

stories. . ^ „ ^ ^ 

irom jest to earnest. Precaution: a Novel (it was 
the custom then to flaunt the moral of a story in its title) was 
published in the fall of 1820. It was a conventional story of 
English society, and readers were allowed to believe that the 
author was an Englishman. But it found few readers. That 
it should have found any only proves that there is always an 
indiscriminate public ready to read an^'thing called a novel. 
There was no inspiration behind the work. What Cooper 
knew of England was confined to what he had been able to pick 
up while on shore leave in sailor rig at London; and what he 
knew of English "high life" must have been all learned from 
books, probably from the novels whose peculiar merits he was 
trying to excel. But Precaution was onl}' a beginning. His 
friends complained of his ha^ang gone abroad for a theme; he 
owed something to America. Somewhat doggedly he set to 
work again, turning to the American Revolution for a plot and 
choosing for the scene the "neutral ground" of AYestchester 
County, where he was then living. But he had little faith that 
his countrj'men could be made to take interest in a story of 
scenes so familiar to them. The first volume of TJte Spy was 
printed before the second was begun ; and to set at rest the 
fears of the printer in regard to its length, the last chapter of 
the second volume was written, printed, and paged before the 
intervening chapters were written. It appeared late in 1821 
and its success was as immediate as it was unexpected. There 
were three editions and a dramatization within three months. 
It was republished in England with equal success, and was 
promptly translated into French. 

Cooper was roused to a consciousness of his powers. He 
had discovered that writing is a trick not necessarily learned 
at schools ; he had discovered, too, something of the wealth of 



COOPER 81 

his own imagination, and of the joys of creation. He turned 
with lively affection to his other home, the region about Otsego 
Lake, feeling that it would be an easy and pleasant task to 
invest it likewise with a romantic interest. The result was 
The Pioneers^ published early in 1823, the one of all his books 
into which he put most of his heart. He wrote it, he declared, 
to please himself ; but it pleased the public, too, and so well that 
there could be henceforth no question of his fame or calling. 
One more field immediately allured him with its romantic 
possibilities — the sea, which he had known so well in his youth, 
and which still called to him with its old charm as he looked 
out from the Westchester hills across the waves of Long Island 
Sound. He wrote and published The Pilot in the same year. 
From this time on there was no pause. Year after year he 
turned, in the exercise of his imagination, from history and 

tradition to the wilderness, and from the wilderness 
^^^^ to the sea, until, just the year before his death, he 

published the last of the thirty-two tales that bear 
his name. It is impossible to contemplate this result without 
surprise. Cooper was hardly the man one would have expected 
to find in the field of letters. He would have made an excel- 
lent colonizer or general. But he wielded the pen as, in other 
circumstances, he would have wielded the sword or driven the 
plow, indefatigably and fearlessly. His literary industry was 
probably unequalled by any man of his time on this side of the 
Atlantic. In addition to his romances, which he produced at 
the rate of rather more than one a year {The Last of the 
Mohicans was planned and written in four months), he found 
time to write various reviews and articles, of a political or 
historical nature, and notably his History of the United States 
Navy (1839). Besides this, he attended faithfully to his 
social and business duties. He paid off debts ; he founded a 
club in New York City, and kept it alive ; he travelled in Europe 
and studied with keen interest social and political conditions 



82 THE XEAV ENVIROXMEXT 

there, publishing notes of his travel; he engaged in numerous 
controversies, and when the}' led him into libel suits, as they 
frequently did, he argued his own cause. 

The story of Cooper's controversies is not a pleasant one to 
read, and it might well be omitted if it were not so intimatel}' 
connected with his personality and the character of many of 
his later works. To begin with, all the traits of his disposi- 
tion, whether good or bad. were strongly marked. His 
character can be read very plainly in his portrait. He was 
^ upright, straightforward, patriotic, fearless, combative, and 
proud. He held just as tenaciously to unreasonable views as 
to reasonable ones. He was generally reasonable in matters of 
right, luit unreasonable in matters of expediency. He scorned 
compromises. He could not wear honesty with grace nor tem- 
per justice with amiability. A greater man would have been 
content merely to be in the right; Cooper could not rest until 
he had proved his right to others. The result was years of 
strife and bitterness and barren victories; for even to win his 
cause at law was to lose it in the hearts of the people. In 1S26 
he went to Europe and spent seven years at the various cap- 
itals. There were good reasons why he should find life there 
congenial. He had no hatred of the English; his wife had 
come of a Tory family, and he had always been tolerant toward 
the attitude of the Tories in the Revolution, as may be seen 
from the tale of The Spy. Besides, the English read and 
praised his books. Indeed, wherever he might go in Europe, he 
had the gratification of seeing translations of his books dis- 
played in the book-shops. Xevertheless, the European con- 
tempt for most things American, and the false ideas of Ameri- 
can affairs which he found everywhere current, were things he 
could not abide. He spoke out boldly in defence of his coun- 
try in conversation, at public dinners, in printed articles, and 
in letters. He even wrote romances embodying his ^iews. The 
Red Rover and The Wept of Wish-ton- Wish, for example, contain 



COOPER 83 

some very plain satire on foreign arrogance ( " a certain con- 
descension" Lowell called it forty years later); and The Bravo 
and Tlie Headsman were written to glorify republican waj's and 
institutions. His literary work suffered, and his ends were not 
gained. 

He came back to America in 1833, only to find that his own 
countrymen did not appreciate his lo3^alt3^ Apparently they 
had no desire for a defender who persisted in ' ' flaunting his 
Americanism through Europe" and redoubling the ridicule 
he sought to allay. He turned upon the Americans, re- 
viling their provincialism, their greed, their vulgarity, in the 
very terms in which he had heard these things reviled in 
Europe. He published more and worse romances — The 3Ioni- 
kvis, Homeward Bound, Home as Found, — "six volumes," 
said Lowell, "to show he's as good as a lord." "I think," 
wrote a friend, ' ' you lose hold on the American public by rub- 
bing down their shins with brickbats as you do. " Of course 
he lost hold. At Cooperstown, where he made his home after 
his return from Europe, he got into an unfortunate controversy 
with his fellow-townsmen over the possession of a piece of land. 
It led to a lono; train of libel suits. Libel suits also followed 
the publication of his Naval History, which was characteristi- 
cally outspoken in its judgments of many prominent men and 
events. But with every case he won, and he won almost all, 
he lost still more of his popularit3\ 

Naturally he grew embittered. Especially did he grieve 
over the attacks made upon him for his Naval History, in 
which he had tried to tell the simple truth as he saw it, with- 
out bias or partisanship. He took some consolation, however, 
from the thought that his children could, in the future, "point 
to the facts, with just pride that they had a father who dared to 
stem popular prejudice in order to write truth." He found 
refuge in his home, and in the exercise of his art, for his liter- 
ary fertility seemed to increase with his years and in spite of 



84 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

-numerous distractions. Seventeen of his tales, a little more 
than half of the entire number, were written between 1840 
and 1850. Ten of these belong to the years 1840-1845, 
including at least four of high rank, The Pathfinder^ The Deer- 
slayer^ The Tic Admirals, Sind Wing-and-Wlng. But he never 
quite forgave the public, and it was one of his last injunctions 
to his family that no one should be authorized to write his 
biography. He died in 1851, on the eve of his sixty-second 
birthday. A few months later a public gathering in his mem- 
ory was held in New York City, at which Webster presided 
and Bryant delivered the memorial address. 

In reviewing Cooper's literary product, it will be well to fix 
attention upon the surviving portion only, dismissing at once 
all those books which grew out of temporary pas- 
sions or personal prejudices and which have fallen 
into the obli\don they deserve. First, then, to follow a divis- 
ion already indicated, there are the romances drawn more or less 
directly from history. They are of very different degrees of merit. 
Lionel Lincoln^ which ventured upon New England soil (it has 
stirring accounts of the fights at Concord and Bunker Hill) was a 
relative failure. So, likewise, was Mercedes of Castile, which has 
some interest, however, in that it weaves a romance about the 
first voyage of Columbus. Better are Afloat and Ashore and 
Satanstoe, tales of old colonial life in New York. But The Spy, 
which made Cooper's fame at home and which carried it farther 
abroad than Irving's w^as ever carried, remains still one of his 
most widely read books. Moreover, it retained for three- 
quarters of a century the distinction of being the one highly suc- 
cessful romance constructed out of incidents in the war of the 
Revolution. * It derives its chief interest from its central char- 
acter, Harvey Birch, the Spy of the Neutral G-round, a humble 

♦Kennedy's Horse-Shoe Rohmson, Simms's Partisan, Thompson's Green 
Mountain Boys, and Theodore Winthrop's Edwin Brothertoft hold a much in- 
ferior place. Hawthorne's Septimius Felton was left unfinished, 



COOPER 85 

peddler and patriot, who risks life and honor in a condemned 
office, suspected even by his countrymen, and who goes down 
to his grave with no other exoneration or reward than the 
written, but unrevealed, testimony of Washington to the loy- 
alty of his deeds. Few heroes of fiction have been more 
admired. A military officer in Salvador was known to speak of 
" Seiior Birch" as a "model guerrillero, " and a French agent 
of the secret service under Louis Philippe imitated his virtues. 
The second important division of Cooper's works consists of 
the stories of the frontier, especially the five Leather-Stock- 
ing Tales. These latter get their unity and much 
stocking of their interest from a singular character, Natty 
Tales. Bumppo, who appears in them all under various 

names — Leather Stocking, Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder, 
La Longue Carabine. He is the pioneer of the woods; the 
friend of the Mohicans, Chingachgook and Uncas, though 
himself a white man "without across"; the scout, hunter, 
trapper, and philosopher, who is always ready to judge men as 
he would judge animals, according to their several "gifts." 
In The Pioneers (1823), the first of the stories of the wilder- 
ness, he is portrayed in somewhat rude outlines — an old man 
in the background of the tale, living with his still more aged 
friend, Chingachgook, now christianized into Indian John. 
Cooper could have had no thought, when writing this book, of 
using the character a second time. But the portrait took his 
fancy, and when, in 1826, he came to write The Last of the 
Mohicans., he introduced Leather- Stocking again, this time in 
the prime of his life, taking, with Chingachgook and Uncas, an 
active part in the French and Indian War. Here he appears 
in the dignity of mature manhood, with an Indian's cun- 
ning, courage, and fortitude, and a white man's finer sense of 
honor. In The Prairie, which followed in 1827, are depicted 
the closing scenes of his life, wherein, pushed by civilization 
far out upon the Western plains, his mind at the last moment 



86 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

wanders pathetically back to his home among the Otsego hills. 
But Cooper was not yet satisj5ed. Two more chapters were 
added to the history of the scout. The Pathfinder (1840) 
gives us the romance of his middle life, by the shores of Lake 
Ontario; The Deerslayer (1841) shows him on his first war-path, 
by the Otsego. Those who would read the books in the order 
of events, should arrange them thus (as it happens, in alpha- 
betical order): Deerslayer^ Last of the Mohicans, Pathfinder, 
Pioneers, Prairie. It is impossible to say which is the best of 
the five. Most readers will prefer The Last of the Mohi- 
cans for the lively interest of its rapidly succeeding events, 
the narration of which is seldom checked by description or mor- 
alizing. Cooper himself regarded The Pathfinder and TJlc 
Deerslayer as his best works. They certainly represent him at 
the maturity of his powers; and it was of the former that Bal- 
zac said: "It is beautiful, it is grand — I know of no one in 
the world, save Walter Scott, who has risen to that grandeur 
and serenity of colors." Yet The Pioneers and The Prairie 
have charms of their own, the former with its almost lyric de- 
scriptions of forest and lake, the latter with its strange, over- 
powering sense, found also in the pages of Chateaubriand 
and Bryant, of the vastness and majesty of nature as exhibited 
in the solitudes of the American continent. Together the five 
tales are a kind of prose epic of the settlement of the new 
world, of the conquest of man over nature. And the character 
that binds them into one, the frontiersman who bridges the gap 
between white man and red, is a rude type of the independ- 
ence, energy, honesty, and toleration, that have made the 
United States one of the great nations of the earth. 

Of Cooper's tales dealing with the sea, the third natural 

division of his works, five are noteworthy — The Pilot, The Red 

Rover, The Water- Witch, The Two Admirals, and 

Wing-and- Wing. It is sufficient to say of these 

that by common consent they stand at the head of romances of 



COOPER 87 

their kind. Smollett, in the eighteenth centur}^, had drawn 
sailors to the life, but Cooper was virtually the creator of the 
sea-tale as a form of modern fiction. He wrote The Pilot just 
after the appearance of Scott's The Pirate, partly with the 
object of showing how such a theme would be treated by one 
who, unlike Scott, was personally familiar with life on the 
ocean, and who had not to "get up" his technical knowledge 
for the purpose. The difference will be immediately evident to 
any one who reads the opening chapters of The Pilot. But it 
is safe to say that whoever takes up those chapters for the first 
time will speedily forget any critical purpose he may have had. 
The gathering storm and darkness on the Northumberland coast, 
the wild anchorage in a strange roadstead, the mysterious pilot, 
and finally the slow working of the frigate out to sea in the 
teeth of the gale, arouse precisely those feelings of terror and 
admiration that it is one of the chief aims of romance to 
arouse. Cooper differs from other sea-romancers b}^ making 
the reader feel that he is on shipboard, not as a passenger and 
spectator merely, but as one of the crew, with an exact knowl- 
edge of all the dangers that beset him from wind and tide and 
rock and shoal, and with a power to calculate to a nicety the 
reliance to be placed upon every force arrayed against those 
dangers, from spring of mast to draught of keel. It is the 
nearest substitute for actual experience that art can give. We 
can understand how the old seaman to whom Cooper read the 
opening chapters of The Pilot paced the floor in a frenzy of 
excitement. This story, also, be it said in passing, contains a 
character that has been much admired — Long Tom Coffin, the 
veteran whaler of Nantucket. 

Cooper's service to America has already been indicated. 

Never in the recorded history of the world has pioneering been 

carried on upon the same great scale or under 

such picturesque circumstances as here in our own 

country. That the rom ance, or rather the epic, of this great civiliz- 



88 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

ing movement should have been unwritten is a calamity the mind 
refuses to picture. And without Cooper's work it would have 
been pitifully crude and fragmentary. Imagine, for a com- 
parison, the loss to Western Europe if Scott had not brought 
his genius to the reconstruction of her history and legend. 
And our loss would have been Europe's also. It is easy to 
understand why Europe seized upon Cooper's books with such 
eagerness. The tales suffered nothing by translation, for they 
depended not upon any merits of style but upon the story they 
had to tell. And it was just then a story of thrilling interest 
to Europeans, whose eyes were turned curiously upon the 
new world. Some odd results followed, for readers did not 
always stop to consider that they were getting only a partial 
view. Many Europeans thought that life in America meant 
nothing but clearing forests and fighting Indians, and in out-of- 
the-way corners the notion clings even yet. But Cooper should 
not be blamed. It is merely our misfortune that the other 
features of American life found no such adequate portrayal. 
If we had had our Dickens and our Thackeray as well as our 
Scott, the matter might have been different. 

No more is Cooper morally responsible for the flood of yel- 
low-backed literature that followed in his wake. He never 
panders to brutal or vicious appetites. His heroes never hunt 
or fight for pure love of sport, nor lose the occasion to admin- 
ister a sharp reproof to one who does. Natty Bumppo is no 
" monster of goodness, " but beneath his uncouth exterior are 
to be found most of the moral virtues. It is inconceivable 
that any boy could be fired, by reading his history, with a 
desire to go out and scalp Indians. Cooper's very idealiza- 
tion of the Indian character, which has been so much criti- 
cised, is strong evidence of his own faith in the high possibil- 
ities of humanity. Possibly the idealization was carried too 
far, though we are not so sure of that to-day. At the most, it 
must be remembered that it was so only in the case of one or 



COOPER 89 

two characters. His Indians in general are inhuman, con- 
scienceless savages, and he does not hesitate to make them 
perpetrate deeds so revolting that we hurry over the written 
passage without daring to look back. Le Renard Subtil is 
more than a complement for the noble Chingachgook and his 
ill-fated son, who stand out as marked exceptions, like the 
wise man among the wild beasts of Plato's Rejniblic. 

Yet Cooper had many faults. In most points of literary art, 
in style, plot, and dramatic setting, he was distinctly inferior 

to Scott. Scott was himself no master of style ; 

yet Cooper occasionally committed blunders that 
would have put the former to the blush. This was partly a re- 
sult of ignorance, due to his ragged training, and partly a result 
of his indifference and his headlong habits of composition. We 
cannot but wish that some kindly adviser had been at his elbow 
while he wrote, to save him from some of his vices, — to make 
him, for example, substitute man or person for individual^ 
and woman for his ever- offending (to modern taste, at least) 
female^ or to hint that there is neither character-drawing nor 
humor in such distortions as Hurry Harry's a«c?-6?is7i for a??i6z<s7i 
or Leather Stocking's references to "judgmatical" actions and 
"my-hog-guinea" chairs. His plots suffer in much the 
same way. He was too little of an artist and too much of a 
moralist to be a perfect writer of tales. He was everywhere 
concerned for moral effect ; and this, together with his lack of 
humor, led him into constructing absurd situations, thereby 
making it easy for a humorist like Mark Twain to poke fun 
at his entire method. ^ His warriors often harangue on the bat- 
tlefield like Homer's. Natty Bumppo will give an Indian a 
lesson in behavior before he puts a bullet through his heart, 
sublimely indifferent to the fact that the Indian cannot under- 
stand, and that even if he could he might find the code of eti- 
quette different in Indian-heaven. But more serious than all 

♦"Cooper's Literary Oflfences," North American Review, July, 1895. 



90 THE NEW ENVIROXMENT 

J this is Cooper's weakness in character- drawing — a weakness 
which sets him once more below Scott, and far below writers 
like Balzac and Thackeray. Of course we must remember that 
he was writing romances and not character novels ; yet it is a 
pity that, aside from two or three fairly life-like creations, 
his characters, especially his women, are little better than 
puppets. They talk, but their talk is pedantic and labored. 
Their virtues and vices are hung on them like so much wearing 
apparel. 

But while these things condemn Cooper, as a literary artist, 
to an inferior rank, they can not be held to condemn him 

utterly. Even his style is not so bad as it is some- / 
times painted : so long as he is writing narrative ana 
not dialogue it is reall}^ remarkable for firmness and ease. 
Moreover, in his best work, his minor defects in this respect 
and others, are to a great extent obscured by his virtues — by 
the absorbing interest of his thrilling situations, by the com- 
manding presence of his able-bodied and large-hearted heroes, 
and by the poetical glamour which, through his real genius for 
description, he has succeeded in throwing over nearly every 
scene. Let two pages, taken from the quietest part of The 
Last of the Mohicans, speak for some qualities of his art: 

While Heyward and his companions hesitated to approach a 
building so decayed, Hawkeye and the Indians entered within tlie 
low walls, not only without fear, but with obvious interest. While 
the former surveyed the ruins, both internally and externally, with 
the curiosity of one whose recollections were reviving at each mo- 
ment, Chingachgook related to his son, in the language of the Dela- 
wares, and with the pride of a conqueror, the brief history of the 
skirmish which had been fought in his youth in that secluded spot. 
A strain of melancholy, however, blended with his triumph, render- 
ing his voice, as usual, soft and musical. 

In the meantime the sisters gladly dismounted, and prepared to 
enjoy their halt in the coolness of the evening, and in a security 
which they believed nothing but the beasts of the forest could 
invade. 



COOPER 91 

'' Would not our resting place have been more retired, my worthy 
friend," demanded the more vigilant Duncan, perceiving that the 
scout had already finished his short survey, "had we chosen a spot 
less known and one more rarely visited than this?" 

*' Few live who know the block-house was ever raised," was the 
slow and musing answer; " 'tis not often that books are made, and 
narratives written, of such a scrimmage as was here fou't at ween the 
Mohicans and the Mohawks, in a war of their own waging. I was 
then a younker and went out with the Delawares, because I knew 
they were a scandalized and wronged race. Forty days and forty 
nights did the imps crave our blood around this pile of logs, which I 
designed and partly reared, being, as you'll remember, no Indian 
myself, but a man without a cross. The Delawares lent themselves 
to the work and we made it good, ten to twenty, until our numbers 
were nearly equal, and then we sallied out upon the hounds, and not 
a man of them ever got back to tell the fate of his party. Yes, yes; 
I was then young and new to the sight of blood; and not relishing 
the thought that creatures who had spirits like myself should lay on 
the naked ground, to be torn asunder by beasts or to bleach in the 
rains, I buried the dead with my own hands, under that very little 
hillock where you have placed j^ourselves; and no bad seat does it 
make, neither, though it be raised by the bones of mortal men." 

Heyward and the sisters arose, on the instant, from the grassy 
sepulchre; nor could the two latter, notwithstanding the terrific 
scenes they had so recently passed through, entirely suppress an 
emotion of natural horror, when they found themselves in such famil- 
iar contact with the grave of the dead Mohawks. The gray light, the 
gloomy little area of dark grass, surrounded by its border of brush, 
beyond which the pines rose, in breathing silence, apparently, into 
the very clouds, and the deathlike stillness of the vast forest, were 
all in unison to deepen such a sensation. 

"They are gone, and they are harmless," continued Hawkeye, 
waving his hand, with a melancholy smile, at their manifest alarm; 
"they'll never shout the war-whoop nor strike a blow with the 
tomahawk again! And of all those who aided in placing them where 
they lie, Chingachgook and I only are living! The brothers and 
family of the Mohican formed our war party; and you see before you 
all tliat are now left of his race." 

The eyes of the listeners involuntarily sought the forms of the 
Indians, with a compassionate interest in their desolate fortune. 
Their dark persons were still to be seen Avithin the shadows of the 



92 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

block-house, the son h'stening to the relation of his father with that 
sort of intenseness which would be created by a narrative that re- 
dounded so much to the honor of those whose names he had long 
revered for their courage and savage virtues. 

*'Ihad thought the Delawares a pacific people," said Duncan, 
''and that they never waged war in person; trusting the defence of 
their lands to those very Mohawks that you slew!" 

" 'Tis true in part," returned the scout, "and yet, at the bottom, 
'tis a wicked lie. Such a treaty was made in ages gone l>y, through 
the deviltries of the Dutchers, who wished to disarm tlie natives 
that had the best right to the country, where they had s Itled them- 
selves. The Mohicans, though a part of the same nation, having to 
deal with the English, never entered into the silly bargain, but kept 
to their manhood; as in truth did the Delawares, when their eyes 
were opened to their folly. You see before you a chief of the great 
Mohican Sagamores! Once his family could chase their deer over 
tracks of country wider than that which belongs to the Albany Pat- 
terroon, without crossing brook or hill that was not their own; but 
what is left to their descendant! He may find his six feet of earth 
when God chooses, and keep it in peace, perhap?, if he has a friend 
who will take the pains to sink his head so low that the plowshares 
cannot reach it!" 

Coopers place is clear as a writer in the field of strictly 
legitimate romance — the romance of real life, of stirring ad- 
venture and daring deeds, made romantic simply by their in- 
accessibility to most men at most times. His kinship is with 
Scott and Stevenson and all large, healthy, out-of-door na- 
tures. Moreover, he has some claim to consideration among 
writers of universal interest in virtue of the elemental passions 
with which he deals, for the fashions of human heroism do not 
change. Had his insight and his art been equal to his idealizing 
imao-ination, he would have been second to no writer of mod- 
em romance. His old trapper stands upright in the death- 
hour and answers "Here" as Colonel Newcome answers 
"Adsum!" David G-aunt goes forth to battle like David of 
old, with a sling in his hand and a song on his lips. The 
mourning of the Delawares over the body of Uncas reminds 



EARLY POETRY 93 

us of the mourning of the Trojans over the body of Hector. 
Leather-Stocking straps the aged Chingachgook on his back 
and carries him out of the forest-fire as iEueas carried An- 
chises out of burning Troy. Indeed, the fundamental concep- 
tion of Leather-Stocking and his rifle Kill-deer suggests a 
comparison with Odysseus and his bow or King Arthur and his 
good sword Excalilnir. But we may not make the compar- 
ison. We can only deplore the fatal defects that marred a 
genius which might otherwise have set at the beginning of our 
literature an epic worthy to stand by the epics of the old world. 

EARLY POETRY 

That the genius of poetry in America was even more slow 
to respond to the creative impulse than the genius of prose 
romance, is made evident by the story of the publication of 
Bryant's Thanatopsis. When, in 1817, the manuscript of that 
poem appeared in the office of the North American Review of 
Boston — a magazine then but two j^ears old, 3'et already a cri- 
terion of literary taste — it caused no little commotion. Mr. 
Dana, the most sagacious of the young editors, declared that 
it could not have been written in America, and would consent 
to publish it only upon the mistaken assurance of his colleague 
that Dr. Bryant, the poet's father, then at Boston as senator 
to the state legislature, was its author. Nor was Mr. Dana's 
caution unjustified. It is true that nothing could be greatly 
better in its modest way than Freneau's Wild Honeysuckle, 
written long before, but it is also true that that lyric was, as 
one of its admirers has called it, little more than a "first 
stammer."* American poetry became fairly articulate only 
with Thanatojysis. But the young author of 1817 was still 
quite unknown to fame, and the part that he was to play in 
American poetry reaches so far through the nineteeuth cen- 

*Greenough White: Philosophy of American Literature. 



94 THE NEW ENVIRONMEN'T 

tury that it will be well here, before considering him. to glance 
at a few of his contemporaries whose work was associated 
exclusively with the earh^ decades. 

There is perhaps little to keep alive in literary histor}- the 
names of such men as Washington Allston and John Pierpont 
except the fact that they puljlished collections of poetry be- 
fore Bryant. Allston, who is remembered still as 
Washington a painter, studied art abroad, and had the good 

Allston. - ._ . . ^ 

1779-1843. lortune while at Kome to become intimate with 
John Pier- Coleridge. At Boston, where he resided, he exer- 
1785-1866. cised a deep influence upon early art and culture 
in New England. He published a volume of refined 
verse, The Sylphs of the Sca.<ions, in 1813. Pierpont, who 
was a Unitarian clergj'man of Connecticut, published several 
volumes of poems, the first in 1816. Many of his verses, 
such as }Varren^s Address to the American Soldiers ("Stand! 
the ground's your own, my braves!"), had a touch of grandil- 
oquence in them that made them favorites for recitation. 
The spirit of the Revolution survived long in poetry of this 
nature. 

Joseph Rodman Drake, and Fitz-G-reene Halleck, whose 
names are inseparably associated, and who belonged to the 
Xew York group of writers, are two minor poets still held in 
something like aflectionate remembrance. Drake, the younger, 
showed perhaps the greater promise, but he died of consump- 
tion at the age of twenty-five. He was a youth 
Joseph Bod- of many graces of both bodv and mind, who wrote 

man Drake, " , . , . r ^^ • -c -4. tt 

1795-1820. verses ^s a bird sings, tor ihe pure ]oy oi it. His 
fame, as well as Halleck" s, was made by what was 
locally known as --The Croakers" — a series of forty poems 
contributed by them in 1819 to the Xew York Evening Post, 
and signed "Croaker and Co."' Amono; these was Tlie Amer- 
iccf.n Flag ("When Freedom from her mountain height"), 



EARLY POETRY 95 

probably the most widely known of our patriotic poems, 
though it is too declamatory in tone to be given high praise. 
The last four lines were written by Halleck: — 

" Forever float that standard sheet! 

Where breathes the foe but falls before us? — 
With freedom's soil beneath our feet, 
And freedom's banner streaming o'er us!" 

They are not made readily clear even by careful punctuation, 
and it is a pity that the finer lines of Drake's were not allowed 
to stand, in spite of their concluding hj^perbole: — 

" As fixed as yonder orb divine, 

That saw thy bannered blaze unfurled, 
Shall thy proud stars resplendent shine, 
The guard and glory of the world." 

Drake's longest poem is The Culprit Fay, which was 
published in a volume of selected poems ten years after his 
death.* It is the story of a fairy who is compelled to do 
penance for his sinful love of a mortal. The scene is laid in the 
highlands of the Hudson. It is an airy work of fancy in the 
manner of Scott and Moore, whose poems were just then at 
the height of popularity. Like their poems, too, it undeniably 

* The poem was written hastily, and grew out of a conversation with Cooper 
and Halleck over the possibility of giving old world romance a new world set- 
ting. The date commonly given is 1819. Halleck's biographer produces what • 
appears to be incontrovertible evidence that the date should be 1816. Yet 
Cooper did not move to the neighborhood of New York City until 1817. More- 
over, the poem contains these lines : — 

".Joy to thee, Fay '. thy task is done. 
Thy wings are pure, for the gem is won." 

It is difficult to believe that these lines were written before the appearance of 
Moore's Lalla Eookh, w^hich was published in the spring of 1817, and which has, 
at the conclusion of Paradise and the Peri, these lines: — 

"Joy, joy forever! — my task is done— 
The Gates are passed, and Heaven is won!" 

IJesides, the tasks set the culprit fay are not unlike the tasks set the fallen Peri. 



96 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

owes much to Coleridge's Christahel in melody and imagery, 
the two qualities into which most of the merits of Drake's 
poem resolve themselves: — 

" The stars are on the moving stream, 

And fling, as its ripples gently flow, 
A burnished length of wavy beam 

In an eel-like, spiral line below; 
The winds are whist and the owl is still, 

The bat in the shelvy rock is hid. 
And naught is heard on the lonely hill 
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill 

Of the gauze- winged katydid, 
And the plaint of the waiting whip-poor-will, 

Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings. 
Ever a note of wail and woe. 

Till morning spreads her rosy wings, 
And earth and sky in her glances glow." 

Halleck was not of New York City by birth, but went thither 
from his Connecticut home in 1811, and spent nearly forty 

years there as an accountant, writing verse between 
Fitz- Greene whiles when the mood prompted. He rarely wrote 
1790-1867. with sufficient seriousness for entire success, some 

caprice of humor or cynicism frequently leading 
him to lower the tone and spoil the efltect of an otherwise fine 
poem. His best work was done in his j^outh when, like Drake, 
he came under the spell of the popular British poets, in his 
case particularly Campbell and Byron. Fanny^ his longest 
poem, which belongs to the same year as his Croaker con- 
tributions, and which was written in Byron's satirical vein, 
though without any of the abiding elements of Byron's work, 
was immensely popular in its day. A tender monody on 
Burns and a spirited apostrophe to Red Jacket, chief of the Tus- 
caroras, also deserve mention. But Halleck lives for us in two 
poems only — the martial Marco Bozzaris, celebrating the deeds 



EARLY POETRY 97 

and death of that Greek patriot in the defence of liberty in 
1823, which left him 

** Freedom's now, and Fame's, 



One of the few, the immortal names 
That were not born to die;" 

and the little elegy of half a dozen stanzas written after the 
death of his friend Drake, with the frequently quoted 
prayer: — 

*' Green be the turf above thee, 

Friend of my better days ! 
None knew thee but to love thee. 

Nor named thee but to praise." 

Richard Henry Dana, a critic and journalist, who was best 
known in the early twenties for his short-lived Idle Man, to 

which both Bryant and Allston contributed, was 
^iS-mT^' another writer who fell under the English romantic 

influence. His most ambitious piece of verse, 
The Buccaneers^ a poem of more than one hundred stanzas, 
was published in 1827. It is a wild tale of conscience and 
remorse against a background of high- sea piracy and murder, 
with supernatural accessories of a burning ship and a spectre 
horse. It has elements of fascination, but is an uneven pro- 
duction; there are many bad lines, and the good lines have 
always the disadvantage of suggesting the Ancient Mariner. 
One short lyric of Dana's is worth preserving — The Little 
Beach Bird, beginning, 

" Thou little bird, thou dweller by the sea, 
Why takest thou its melancholy voice, 
And with that boding cry 
Along the waves dost fly? 
Oh rather, bird, with me 

Through the fair land rejoice!" 



9 J THE KEW ENVIRONMENT 

Nathaniel Parker Willis, though somewhat younger than 

the foregoing poets, may very properly be considered in this 

place, because he helped to perpetuate at New York 

j^. p. Willis, the tradition established there by Irving, Pauldino;, 

1806-1867. ^^ .. . -, Tx -, -,..,., 

Halleck, andJJrake — a tradition which turned jour- 
nalism and literature into something of a social pastime. Willis 
came from Portland, Maine ; was a graduate of Yale and an 
early contributor to the Youtlis Companioiu which his father 
had founded; founded several magazines himself; was associ- 
ated with Gr. P. Morris on the New York Mirror and the Home 
Journal; published poems and letters of travel {Sketches., 1827, 
Pencillings hy the Way., 1835) ; and was once led, by reporting 
some social and political gossip, into a conventional and blood- 
less duel. He had a taste both for society and for rural life, 
and spent his later years at his beautiful home, "Idlewild, '" 
in the Highlands of the Hudson, dying, however, in the pursuit 
of his profession, which had become at last anything but a 
pastime. He was for many years a kind of literary autocrat, 
standing at the head of those sentimental "Knickerbocker" 
writers who, if we omit Bryant and Poe, dominated New York 
letters in the palmy days of the Kaickerhocker 3Iagazine, before 
the appearance of the manlier poetry of Taylor and Stoddard. 
Willis had many talents, but employed them mostly upon com- 
monplace and even frivolous themes, where his quick percep- 
tion, wit, sentiment, and grace, shone to the best advantage. 
He struck his highest note in the poem, Unseen Spirits ("The 
shadows lay along Broadway"). His sacred poems, such as 
Absalom and Lazarus and Mary, are composed in a smooth, 
well-sustained blank verse, and had at one time wide popular- 
ity. But the vogue of Willis passed with the coming of a more 
strenuous national life and sentiment, and now we have little 
more than his memory, which, like the golden tress of Melanie, 
one of his poetic heroines, 

" Floats back upon the summer gale." 



EARLY rOETRY 09 

To search further among the professed poets of the first 

third of the century is only to revive, rather uselessly, such 

names as that of Maria Gowen Brooks, who was 
Mrs. Brooks, ' 

(?) 1795-1845. once compared with Mrs. Browning, and whose 
J. G. Peravai, sentimental and hio^hly colored Oriental tale of 

1795-1856. ^ -^ 

Zopliid^ or the Bride of Seven (1825-1833) won for 
her from Southey the sobriquet of "Maria del Occident"; or 
that of James Gates Percival, who was sometimes called by 
courtesy a scholar, and who, among his voluminous verse, left 
one or two poems, like The Coral Grove., of an undeniabh" dis- 
tinctive charm. Rather better worth recording, it seems, are 
the names of a few who, not otherwise thought of as poets, 
chanced to write a single poem or song of sufficiently genuine 
feeling and melody to give it more than a fleeting existence. 
Francis Scott Key, a lawyer of Washington, wrote Tlie Star- 

Spangled Banner on the occasion of the bombard- 
F. s Key, ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ McHenry by the British in 1814. John 

1779-1843. '^ ^ 

J. H. Payne, Howard Payne, the dramatist, won lasting fame 
i/92-i8o-^. \i\\]x his Home, Sweet Home, suno; first at the Covent 

S. Woodworth, ' ' * 

1785-1842. Garden Theatre, London, as a part of his opera, 
f:I:^7''''' (^"^(^ri, the Maid of Milan (1823). Samuel Wood- 

J.802-i.8o4:. 

c. c. Moore, worth, a journalist of New York, wrote Tlie Old 
1779-1863. Q^j,^^^ Budget (182G); George P. Morris, a younger 

associate of Woodworth' s, was the author of My Mother s Bible 
and Woodman., Spare that Tree. Dr. Clement 0. Moore, a 
Greek and Hebrew scholar of New York, was the author of that 
children's classic, founded upon an old Dutch legend, 
^i7m-iM^'^'^ J- Visit from St. Nicholas (" 'Twas the night before 
E. c. Pinkney, Christmas"). In the South, Richard Henry Wilde 
1802-1828. ^£ Georgia, also a scholar, echoed the melodies of 
his native Ireland in his stanzas (about 1815), My Life is Like 
the Summer Rose; while the southern romantic and chivalric 
spirit was fairly represented by Edward Coate Pinkney, a young 

LcfC. 



100 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

midshipman, who printed at Baltimore in 1825 a small volumiB 
of poems containing the one beginning, 

'' I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone." 

These were the bardlings and songsters. We turn now to 
the one man born in America before 1800 whose call to poetry 
was both high and steadfastly, consistently honored. 

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, 1794-1878 

William Cullen Bryant virtually belongs, like Irving and 

Cooper, to New York, though he was a native of New England 

and wrote his earliest poetry there. He was 
Early Life. /. « 

born m the autumn of 1794 m the little town of 

Cummington, where the north fork of the Westfield River goes 
"brawling over a bed of loose stones in a very narrow valley" 
in the semi-mountainous region of western Massachusetts. 
He was the second of seven children. His ancestors had 
been Americans for generations, several of them having been 
among the passengers of the Mayflower. His father was a 
physician and surgeon, of abilities quite beyond the small coun- 
try practice with which he contented himself; he also served 
several terms in the state legislature. His mother was a model 
housewife, equally adept, as her diary shows, at • ' teaching Cul- 
len his letters" and ' ' making him a pair of breeches. " 

The boy's early schooling was carried on at home and at 
the district school. At home he had the use of a library 
exceptionally fine for that time and place, containing, as it 
did, most of the world's classics from Plutarch to Shake- 
speare, together with such English classics as Gibbon, Johnson, 
and Wordsworth. His outdoor sports were many, — trout-fish- 
ing, squirrel-hunting, and snow-balling; and there were the 
time-honored devices for turning work into play at the seasons 
of making maple-syrup and cider, and husking corn. Barn- 
raisings and singing-schools varied the diversions. Few of 



BRYANT 101 

these things, however, found their way into young Cullen's 
verses — for he began to write verses in his ninth 3'ear. Boy- 
like, he was ambitious of greater themes and sought exercise 
in paraphrasing the Book of Job, or in celebrating an eclipse 
in turgid lines: — 

" How awfully sublime and grand to see 
The lamp of Day wrapped in Obscurity !" 

Of course, in this juvenile verse, the sun's ray is "genial," 
birds " sit upon the spray," "stillness broods," and so forth. 
It is difficult now to understand how people of taste could ever 
delight in such circumlocutions as "the lamp of day" or such 
stately phraseology as "to see the sun remove behind the 
moon." But so it was. The English poetic models upon 
which Bryant formed his taste were full of this sort of thing, 
and he naturally caught the manner. Unfortunately, it was a 
manner from which he never, even in his best work, entirely 
escaped. At the age of thirteen he wrote a poem that was 
published at Boston (1808) in pamphlet form. It was a polit- 
ical satire in five hundred lines, called The Embargo, and was 
aimed at the unpopular policy of Jefferson's administration in 
closing our ports to foreign commerce because of certain dis- 
putes with Great Britain. In it the President was held up to 
scorn along with Error and Faction and other monsters that 
made "injured Commerce weep. " There was sufficient reason 
why the poem should be popular then, though there is no 
I'eason why it should be remembered now except as the work 
of a very precocious little boy. 

He was sent away to an uncle to learn Latin; then to a 
minister in a neighboring township, where he paid a dollar a 
week for his bodily and mental fare, the former chiefly bread 
and milk, the latter Greek and mathematics. In the fall of 
1810 he went to Williams College, where he remained seven 
months. This completed his schooling. He made some prepa- 



102 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

ration for continuing his studies at Yale, but his father was 
unable to send him there, and he had to content himself with 
chanting Greek choruses among the Hampshire hills, or mak- 
ing his own first essays at poetry. 

It was during a ramble among these hills in the autumn of 
ISll, when he was not yet quite seventeen j^ears old, that the 
conception of TJianatopfiis ('"Vision of Death") 
''Thanatoii- Came to him ; and the composition immediately fol- 
^^^' lowed. He had been reading Blair's poem, The 

Grave ^ and certain verses of Kirke White's and 
Southey's, and these may have helped to suggest the sombre 
theme of his own poem ; but the immediate inspiration came 
from the autumnal scene around him, the subdued colors of 
earth and sky, the bare branches, the fallen leaves, and the 
decaying trunks of the forest trees. He went home and, sitting 
at his father's desk, began to write in the middle of a line; 

'' Yet a few days, and thee 
The all-beholding sun shall see no more 
In all his course." 

He broke off, almost as abruptly, in the middle of the forty- 
ninth line, and left the poem in a pigeon-hole of the desk. 
There it was afterward found by his father, who had always 
taken a sympathetic interest in his poetical exercises, and who 
realized at once that this was a good poem, though it is doubt- 
ful whether even a father's pride enabled him to realize just 
how good. He at least thought it worthy to be offered to the 
North American Eevieiv, with the result described earlier in 
this chapter. It is interesting to turn to that old number of 
the Review and read the poem in its first form. We miss the 
familiar beginning: — 

" To him who in the love of Nature holds 
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
A various language." 



BRYANT 103 

"We miss also the homily at the close, which, although not the 
best part of the poem, is the most frequently quoted : — 

" So live, that when thy summons comes to join 
The innumerable caravan which moves 
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take 
His chamber in the silent halls of death, 
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, 
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave 
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." 

These additions were made when Bryant published his first 
thin volume of poems in 1821, and a few further changes were 
made afterward. But the central theme, the universalit}^ of 
death, was fully set forth in the original form and required no 
changes to make it complete. This j^outh in his seventeenth 
year had quite unconsciously produced a poem which none of 
the brilliant galaxy of poets then ascendant in England would 
have been ashamed to own. If it be true, as we have said, 
that no American boy can afford not to read Benjamin Frank- 
lin's Autobiography^ it is almost equally true that no one who 
cares to cultivate a love of the best in poetry can afford not 
to learn by heart the eighty-one lines of Thanatopsis. 

Of course the anonymous, fragmentary-looking bit of 
verse brought no immediate fame to Bryant, who was indus- 
triously preparing himself for the very practical life he was 
destined to lead. He read law, and in 1815 was licensed to 
practice. The celebrated lines To a Waterfowl were the out- 
come of an incident of this stasje in his career. He was walkino; 
to a neighboring village with the object of finding a place to 
open a law office, and chanced to observe the flight of a lone 
bird across the evening sky. 

" Whither, midst falling dew, 
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, 
Far, through their rosy depths dost thou pursue 
Thy solitary way." 



104 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

He fancied he saw in this uncompanioned voyage along 
" that pathless coast, the desert and illimitable air," a likeness 
to his own situation, and, full of the forebodings natural to a 
young man when first confronting the world, he sought to 
derive from it consolation: — 

'* He who from zone to zone 
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, 
In the long way that I must tread alone 

Will lead my steps aright." 

After some years of practice at G-reat Barrington, and 
after his marriage, which followed upon the lyrical prelude of 
" Oh fairest of the rural maids," Bryant determined to aban- 
don the law, partly because of his disgust at learning that in 
that profession mere technicalities could sometimes defeat 
justice, and partly because he longed for larger opportunities. 
In 1825 he went to New York and entered upon what proved 
to be his lifelong career — journalism. He succeeded rather 
slowly at first, but after his connection with the 
Public Evening Post, and especiall}^ after his succession to 

the chief editorship of that journal, his fortunes 
rapidly mended. He not only made the Evening Post a news- 
paper of the highest rank, but by the purity of his life and 
ideals, and the courage with which he always espoused what he 
believed to be the right, he sensibly elevated the somewhat 
low tone of the American press, and exercised a profound and 
wholesome influence upon American politics and public life. 
He lived and acted in the full con\dction that, in his own words, 

'* Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; 
The eternal years of God are hers; 
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, 
And dies among his worshippers." 

For fifty years he faithfully performed the exacting duties 
that fell to him, finding change and rest in half a dozen voyages 



BRYANT 105 

to Europe, or in such hours of retirement as he could snatch 
at the old Cummington homestead, or at the beautiful suburban 
residence he had provided for himself at Roslyn, Long Island. 
From time to time he gathered his fugitive verses and pub- 
lished a slender volume. Late in life, too, he sought relief 
from more strenuous duties by translating the Iliad and the 
Odyssey into the blank verse of which he rightly felt himself 
to be a master. The translations are a little cold, but for 
faithfulness and majesty they rank among the best that have 
been made. These were finished in 1871. For nearly seven 
years more the poet's mental activity kept pace with his bodily 
vigor, until the fatal fall, in his eighty-fourth year, on the stone 
steps of Greneral Wilson's house, just after he had delivered a 
public address on Mazzini, in the hot sun at Central Park. 
He died after two weeks of semi-consciousness and was buried 
at Roslyn. 

Bryant's prose, although several volumes, consisting chiefly 
of occasional addresses, have been preserved, holds no real 

place in our literature. It was through his poetry 
The Man and that he won his wide audience, and through the 

high quality of it only, never from its range or 
quantity. His poems are all short — the merely necessary 
and spontaneous expression of a poetic spirit, bound for the 
most part to a prosaic life. He never attempted anything so 
large as an epic or a drama. Even in the lyric field he con- 
fined himself to simple subjects and long-tried measures, mak- 
ing no experiments in the multitude of forms and moods with 
which our lyric poetry of the nineteenth century has been 
enriched. The sensuous warmth of Keats, the ethereal bright- 
ness of Shelley, were not in his manner. The Tennysonian 
idyll and ballad were quite as much ])eyond his reach as the 
hcdlade and the rondeau that came in with his old age. His 
employment of the Spenserian stanza is not happy. His few 



106 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

sonnets are irregular and ineffective. Yet, by such sim»jle 
magic as he knew, he produced some lyrics that show a mastery 
of form and music most surprising in one who practiced so 
little, together with a sincerity of feeling that puts any mere 
technical mastery quite into the background. There is no 
better example of this than a poem written late in hfe (as 
characteristic, by the way, of Bryant as Crossing the Bar is of 
Tennyson or Prospice of Browning) — Waiting hy the Gate, in 
which the evening bird, the streaming sunshine, the quiet wood 
and lea, and the turning hinges of the gate, conspire to make 
a song and a picture of unfading charm. Other examples 
almost equally good, and most of them more widely known, 
are June, The Planting of the Apple Tree, Rohert of Lincoln, 
The Snow- Shower, The Death of the Flowers. 

However, Brj^ant's peculiar excellence lies in that depart- 
ment of lyric poetry which is farthest removed from all that 
the word lyric strictly implies— namely, in descriptive and 
meditative verse. He loves to stand upon Monument Mountain 
and brood over the slow changes of the centuries, or to walk by 
G-reen Biver, trying to put behind him the cares of existence, 
and envying the stream 

* ' as it glides along 
Through its beautiful banks in a trance of song." 

Some of his descriptions are as sharp as etchings. Take 
almost any part of the Summer Wind, of the Winter Piece, of 
the Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood: — 

''The thick roof 
Of green and stirring branches is alive 
And musical with birds, that sing and sport 
In wantonness of spirit; while below 
The squirrel, with raised paws and form erect, 
Chirps merrily. Throngs of insects in the shade 
Try their thin wings and dance in the warm beam 
That waked them into life," 



BRYANT 107 

Tlie Waterfowl^ too, is a poem that engraves itself on the 
memory; to read it is to add a permanent picture to the mind, 
so that ever afterward the slightest suggestion is sufficient to 
call up the vision of that dark-limned fowl pursuing its way 
along the pathless coast. These vivid effects are produced, of 
course, by a vivid imagination, an imagination that always 
derives from intensely seized fact. That the strong line in 
Thanatopsis, 

" Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste," 
was inserted only after Bryant had seen the ocean, is proof 
that his inspiration was of the most genuine kind. 

Enough has been quoted already to show that Brj'-ant was 
pre-eminently a poet of nature. Two-thirds of his poems have 
some aspect of nature for their theme. He belongs to that 
school of which Wordsworth, among modern English writers, 
stands at the head. He has often been compared with Words- 
worth. It was inevitable, perhaps, that in the case of our 
early writers these comparisons should be made, as of Irviug 
with Goldsmith, of Cooper with Scott. No harm can come of 
them, so long as we feel and frankly admit that our own writers 
are secondary, and even in some measure derivative, while still 
maintaining that they were never weakly imitative. Bryant 
was as sincere a lover of Nature as Wordsworth, and had, if 
not quite the same high endowment, the same divine right, to 
sing her beauties and her consolations. What the primrose 
and the daffodil were to Wordsworth, the yellow violet and the 
fringed gentian were to Bryant, and if ever he seemed to fol- 
low Wordsworth it was in a spirit of sympathy, not of emula- 
tion. New England has her own flowers and birds, and we_^an 
only rejoice that they found their poet. 

Yet Bryant was much more than the poet of the Hamp- 
shire and Berkshire hills; nor was his vision limited to the 
birds and flowers. His imagination, large and seer-like, 



108 THE NEW ENYIRONME^^T 

swept beyond the landscape spread before his eye, exploring 
the vast reaches of a continent, from '-Hudson's western 
marge "" to the 

'' palms of Mexico and vines 

Of Texas and the limpid brooka 

That from the fountains of Sonora glide 

Into the calm Pacific." 

Read A Forest Hymn, Tlie Hurricane, A Rain-Dream, The 
Prairies, The Xight Journey of a River, and mark how the poet 
is resistlessly drawn to the larger music and beauty of nature — 
the anthems of the forest trees and the panorama of the storm ; 
how he traces the currents of life through sap and sunbeam and 
river; how he penetrates into the graves of the Mound-builders 
and conjures up pictures of long-gone ages, when 

" lovers walked, and wooed 
In a forgotten language, and old tunes 
From instruments of unremembered form 
Gave the soft winds a voice." 

It is this high imaginative gift which Bryant possessed, in com- 
mon with Cooper of our prose writers, and with Emerson and 
Whitman of our poets, yet touched in him with a fervor and a 
reverence all his own, that makes him peculiarly a poet of the 
new world and of an elder, almost primitive, time — in a word, 
bardic. 

Yet Bryant had limitations fully as marked as his abilities. 
He had c^uite as little humor in his composition as certain 
other poets of -high seriousness" — Dante, for instance, or 
Walt Whitman. He >• had a talent for solitude and silence. "" 
Though by no means a man of gloomy disposition, he was over- 
given to melancholy musings; in spite of his beautiful lyric of 
June, he was the poet of October and November. 

" Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sere." 

And he was, in his poetry at least, almost passionless ; he gives 



BRYANT 109 

but few evidences in it of strong human interests or sympa- 
thies, and altogether too few words of hearty, hopeful cheer. 
His very love of nature was in part a distaste for society— he 
sought and found in woods and fields a refuge from the turmoil of 
life and the sordidness of the world. If we did not know so well 
his character and deeds, we should have imagined him like the 
river he has described on its night journey, stealing away from 
the pollution of human abodes to the stainless sea, or like his 
Wind of Night, 

** A lonely wanderer between earth aud cloud, 
In the black shadow and the chilly mist, 
Along the streaming mountainside, and through 
The dripping woods, and o'er the plashy fields, 
Roaming and sorrowing still, like one who makes 
The journey of life alone, and nowhere meets 
A welcome or a friend, and still goes on 
In darkness. ' ' 

Thanatopsls remains, first and last, his great achievement 

in form a perfect example of English blank verse, of which 
he alone among American writers has attained to any real 
mastery ; in substance an epitome of his powers, with its lofty ' 
imagination and its musings upon the themes of nature and 
death. It barely escapes, too, his besetting melancholy, 
though, on the whole, it is more consoling than depressing, 
with the benign presence of Nature felt through it all, and 
sweet, 

* * Strange intimations of invisible things 
Which, while they seem to sadden, give delight, 
And hurt not, but persuade the soul to prayer." * 

It has been called a pagan poem, with no ray of Christian hope 
or promise of immortality. The mere absence of these things 
does not make it pagan; yet if any one is left unsatisfied with 
the spirit of reverence that breathes through its lines, he may 
* R. H. Stoddard: The Dead Master. 



110 THE NEW ENVIRONMENT 

find a complement in The Flood of Years, that majestic chant 
■written in the poet's eighty-second year. Together the two 
poems make a perfect confession of faith, and mark both 
verges of a life and genius that for purity and consecration it 
would be hard to find excelled. 



CHAPTER V 

ROMANCE. POE, HAWTHOKNE 

The dearth of American literature for nearly two hundred 
years was essentially a dearth of romance. The cause may 
be traced in part to Puritanism. The Puritan temperament 
was not one to indulge visions save such as were born of religion 
or superstition, and the New England writers rarely turned to 
fictitious themes. The early chroniclers, for instance, were 
content to remain chroniclers ; they showed no such tendency 
as John Smith of Alrginia to infuse imagination into their nar- 
ratives. In the non-Puritan South, indeed, had the South 
been studious of the literary art, romance might have appeared 
early. As it was, we have seen that the beginnings were made 
at Philadelphia by Charles Brockden Brown, though not until 
about 1800. Shortly after that, the romantic spirit, in a 
poetic guise, could be detected in the ephemeral work of such 
New York writers as Drake and the elder Dana, or in the 
poems of Mrs. Brooks, written largely in Cuba. With Irving 
and Cooper, both also of New York, the creative imagination 
was finally unfettered and American literature came into being. 
Little then remained but to refine upon the work of these two 
prolific writers, — to combine the art of the one with the 
inventive faculty of the other, and to make those further 
excursions into the regions of the supernatural or the spiritu-^l 
that afford the final test of the romancer's power. This Is 
virtually what was done by two writers of the second third of 
the century, Poe and Hawthorne — the greatest representatives 
of our literature. on its purely creative side. And of these it 
may be noted that the one to come earliest to fame belonged 

111 



112 ROMANCE 

externall}', by everything but the accident of birth, to the 
South. 

EDGAR ALLAX POE, 1809-1849 

It is a striking commentary upon the transitor}' and un- 
reliable nature of human records that a man should be able to 
live, as Edgar Allan Poe did, for many years in the public eye, 
and in an age when everything seems to go on record, and yet 
leave the simplest facts of his biography surrounded with 
mystery. Poe"s ancestry, the place and date of his birth, his 
character and manner of life, and the cause and manner of 
his death, have all been subjects of doubt and sometimes of 
-violent dispute. This is due in some measure to the irregu- 
larity of his life, which made mystification on his part possible 
or even desirable, and in some measure to the prejudices of 
his critics. The main facts and dates seem to be now settled, 
but in the more delicate matter of character and habits we 
must still speak in qualified terms. 

Edgar Allan Poe was born, the second of three children, 
at Boston, January 19, 1809. His father was a Baltimorean, 
the son of a Eevolutionary patriot, possibly of Irish 
descent. His mother was of English birth. Both 
were members of a theatrical company then placing at Bos- 
ton. Nearly three years later, by the death of the mother, 
at Richmond. Virginia, the children were left orphans. Edgar 
was adopted by Mr. John Allan, a Scotchman who had made 
a fortune in Virginia in the tobacco trade. He was brought 
up in luxury, a much spoiled child — petted for his beauty 
and precocity, amusing himself with dogs and ponies at summer 
resorts, and declaiming on the table for Mr. Allan's guests while 
they drank their wine. In his seventh year he was taken to 
England and put into school in a London suburb, an experi- 
ence which afterward furnished a setting for the story of 
William Wilson. Five years later he returned with his adoptive 
parents to Richmond. At the age of seventeen, a proud, 



POE 113 

reserved, half-melancholy and wholly self-willed youth, he 
entered the University of A^irginia. There he studied the 
ancient and modern languages and practiced athletics and the 
several " gentleman 1}^" forms of dissipation. He was with- 
drawn by Mr. Allan for incurring gambling debts. From the 
tedious routine of Mr. Allan's counting-room he ran away to 
Boston, published there an anonymous little volume of forty 
pages — the Byronic Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) — and 
enlisted in the army under an assumed name. * Poe afterward 
allowed the story to be circulated that during this period he 
had gone abroad to assist the Greeks in their struggle for 
liberty, like Byron, and that he had spent part of the time in 
St. Petersburg. Mr. Allan, discovering his whereabouts, 
secured his discharge from the army, and obtained his ap- 
pointment, as a cadet, to West Point. A few months of the 
severe discipline of that school, however, sufficed for Poe's 
restless nature, and it is probable that he deliberately brought 
upon himself the dismissal which followed. He found himself 
adrift, at the age of twenty-two, with nothing further to expect 
from Mr. Allan. 

Literature presented itself as his most natural vocation. 
Poe had, indeed, begun to take himself very seriously as a poet 

before he was twenty, and he had published a 
Manhood. -r.i. ..i .. ^, 

second volume at Baltimore while waiting for his 

cadetship. This volume contained, in addition to a revision 

of the ambitious Tamerlane and some minor poems, the mystical 

and scarcely intelligible Al Aaraaf. A second edition, issued 

at New York shortly after his expulsion from West Point, 

contained several new poems of real promise, like Israfel and 

To Helen. But poverty and the maturing of his powers con- * 

spired to turn his attention to prose, and his first success of 

note was made through that medium. In 1833 a Baltimore 

* Woodberry's Poe, American Men of Letters Series. 



114 ROMANCE 

weekly, The Saturday Visiter, offered a prize of one hundred 
dollars for the best prose tale submitted. Poe, then in desper- 
ate straits, submitted half a dozen. A MS. Found in a Bottle 
was awarded the first prize. John P. Kennedy, the novelist, 
who was one of the judges, took a kindly interest in the author, 
securing him some work in journalism, and probabl}^ providing 
even food and clothing. Poe was then living at Baltimore with 
his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and her daughter Virginia. Two years 
later he went to Richmond to assist in editing the Southern 
Literary Messenger, and about the same time married Virginia 
Clemm. She was a mere child, scarcely fourteen, but Poe, 
whose reverence for women was his noblest trait, loved and 
cared for her devotedly through all the vicissitudes of poverty 
and ill health that ensued, until her death eleven years later, 
a short time before his own. The inspiration of some of his 
finest creations — the child lovers of Eleonora, for instance — is 
to be found in this tender and ill-fated attachment. 

It is a melancholy history to follow, a history of fierce 
struggle and final defeat. That Poe should be blamed for 
waging war upon society as he sometimes did, is not clear; on 
the principle of retaliation there was much to justify him. Yet 
we must feel that if he had onl}^ spent the little moral strength 
that was given him in waging war upon his own weaknesses, 
the end might have been happier. AYhen fame did come to him, 
it was accompanied with envy and detraction, and he never 
had any measure of real prosperity. His wilful and erratic 
temperament, further perverted by his more or less frequent 
yielding to the temptations of liquor and opium, made any 
continued effort impossible. One career after another was 
opened to him only to be closed again ; one enterprise after 
another was undertaken onlj^ to fail or be abandoned. The 
eighteen months at Richmond were followed by seven years 
at Philadelphia, where he edited successively The Gentle- 
man's Magazine and Graham's Magazine. In the editorship 



POE 115 

of the latter he was succeeded by Rufiis W. Glriswold, who 
became, after Poe's death, his hostile biographer. This was 
the period of his greatest productiveness. In 1838 was 
published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pi/m, a fantastic 
and horrible but professedly realistic sea -tale. In 1839 
appeared Talcs of the Grotesque and Arahesque. Through 
this period, too, must have been written many of the poems 
that were published in the A'olume of 1845, The Raven and 
Other Poems. In 1844 he went to New York, and finally took 
up his residence at a cottage at Fordham, on the outskirts of 
the city. There, in Januar}^, 1847, his wife died, and he fol- 
lowed her bod}' to the grave wrapped in the military cloak that 
had been her last coverlet against the winter" s cold. A severe 
illness succeeded, from which he recovered physically, but 
the Poe of the remaining two jesiYS was searcely the same man, 
— the wreck of a wreck, though able yet to compose such mon- 
odies of madness as Eureka and The Bells and Ulahnne. The 
end came tragicall}'. He was returning to New York from a 
visit to Richmond in the autumn of 1849, when chance brought 
him and election day together in the city of Baltimore. He 
was found in an election booth intoxicated, or drugged, or 
both, and was taken to a hospital where he died in a delirium 
several days later. 

Immediately men's fancies began to play with the memory 
of the erratic genius, and a process of myth-making began 
His Character ^'^^^^ ^^^ gone on for half a century, transforming 
Poe into a kind of superhuman creature, angelic or 
diabolic according to the prejudices of the myth-maker. The 
mere seeker for facts is everywhere met by such maundering 
as that of Griswold, who, shortly after Poe's death, described 
him as one who ' ' would walk the streets, in madness or mel- 
ancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes 
upturned in passionate prayer,"" or who, "with his glances in- 
troverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face 



116 EOMANCE 

shrouded in gloom, would brave the wildest storms, and all 
night, with drenched garments and arms beating the winds 
and rains, would speak as if to spirits that at such times only 
could be evoked by him from the Aidenn. " It is almost 
impossible now to get behind this veil of tradition and see the 
man Poe face to face as his fellows saw him, a desperate 
struggler for his dail}^ bread. Even with the clearest light, 
so complex a character as his would be hard to analyze and 
still harder to judge. We must admit that, with all his genius, 
he >was morally delinquent on many counts. He lacked a 
fine sense of honor. He had no adequate conception of a 
man's duties either to himself or to his fellows, and though 
many stood ready to befriend him, he lived in spiritual soli- 
tude, the friend of no man. He did not exactly lack will, as 
has been so often said, for he acted vigorously through his 
short life; but he seemed not to recognize an}' specific moral 
ends toward which a man should bend his activity. He was 
full of contradictions. Though possessed of a keen, cool, 
logical mind, he was always toying with speculations that sober 
science repudiates. His exalted dreams of purit}' and good- 
ness were in strong contrast to the perversity of his deeds. It 
is doubtful whether he knew the meaning of the word morality, 
and the judge of his character must feel that if there be such 
a thing as a man who can do evil deeds without being himself 
evil, Poe was that man. At any rate, between his admirers 
and his detractors one may most safely take the middle ground 
that his was not a case for either praise or blame, but only 
pity. Heredity and training were against him, the very con- 
ditions of x\merican life were adverse, and the tragedy of his 
career is best remembered in sorrow. After all, his works are 
our permanent possession, and the highest of them were 
touched only with the misery and pathos of his life, never with 
its dishonor. 

Poe's work as a journalist and critic does not call for much 



POE 117 

comment. In the circle of his authorit}'' he came to be well 

known and feared; and the independence of his views and 

his frankness in expressing them did a real service 

Minor Prose. n . <> -, ..... 

to the profession or literary criticism in America, 
which had degenerated to mere idle compliment and mutual 
admiration. But his critical method was not the method of 
. calm inquiry which sets up standards and judges fearlessly 
and honestly by them. He was fearless enough, but unfair. 
He had critical acumen and exquisite literary sensibilities, and 
so long as he depended on these he did well. He knew the 
marks of genius; a Tennyson or a Hawthorne, even though 
unknown to fame, was immediately known to Poe. But his 
foolish prejudices and personal jealousies often rendered his 
judgments worthless. A man who could write an article on 
Longfellow and Other Plagiarists was not likely to carry with 
him either sympathy or conviction. He was too extravagant 
and too fond of the sensational. The charge of literary theft in 
particular he liked to make, though he rarely proved any thing- 
more than a measure of indebtedness which the authors them - 
selves would have been ready to acknowledge. Efforts have 
since been made to show that he was himself not innocent of 
plagiarism. But these efforts have succeeded scarcely better 
than his own. That he should have gone to Macaulay's War- 
ren Hastings instead of to an encyclopaedia for a description 
of the holy cit}^ of Benares, which he needed in his Tale of the 
Ragged Mountains^ counts for little. And as for the many 
striking parallels between his poems and those of a certain Dr. 
Chivers, of Georgia,* the only conclusion an impartial student 
can reach is that Chivers owed far more to Poe than Poe ever 
owed to Chivers. Probabl}^ Poe has been the least "in- 
fluenced " of all melodious poets since Spenser. 

Poe's best criticisms of a general nature are his essays on 

* .Joel Henlon: In the Poe Circle. 



118 ROMANCE 

Jlie Poetic Principle and TJie Pliilosophij of Composition, though 
both must be read guardedly. One of the theories h\id down 
in the first, that there can be no such thing as a long poem, 
may be supported only l)y assuming that there is no poetry but 
lyrical or emotional poetry. The second essay is occupied with 
an explanation of the mechanical way in which The Raven 
was constructed — a very entertaining explanation, but one that 
no one who knows Poe or who knows poetry will accept as final. 
His so-called scientific or philosophical works, Eureka and the 
rest, are worthless. He loved to make a great show of learn- 
insr by all sorts of obscure references, but he had little real 
scholarship, and though he was a subtle analyst he was not a 
profound reasoner. His greatness lay in his imaginative work 
— his tales and his poems. 

The tales may be said to constitute a distinct addition to 

the world's literature. From time immemorial there have been 

tales in prose and in verse, tales legendary, roman- 

The Tales. ^ ^ ' & J? 

tic, and humorous, but never any quite like Poe's. 
How difficult it is to find any derivation for them ma}' be seen 
from the fact that the writers most commonly mentioned as 
ha\ing given some direction to Poe"s genius are Defoe and 
Bulwer! Godwin and the German Hofiman would be nearer 
the mark, yet very distant still. '-Bizarre" and "terrific" 
are the words which Kennedy in his helplessness applied to the 
tales; and the words represent fairly the first impression 
which they will always make, for the two qualities of strange- 
ness and power are to be found in nearly all. A few are gro- 
tesque only, but they are among the weakest and are seldom 
read. Perhaps we may venture to divide the important ones, 
according to their dominant motives, into analytical tales, alle- 
gorical or moral tales, and tales of the supernatural. 

The analytical tales are tales embracing situations that 
call for the acutest exercise of the human reason — the unravel- 
ling of a mystery, the detection of some obscure law of nature, 



POE 119 

or the achievement of some difficult feat by the resources of 
science. 7Vie 6^o?c/-5«^is one of thebest of this type. It has 
in it a strong element of adventure, but that Poe's chief inter- 
est did not lie in this is shown by the fact that the climax of 
the story is not the finding of Captain Kidd's treasure, but the 
deciphering of the cryptogram through which the treasure 
was found. Other writers of such stories, Jules Verne, for 
instance, in his Journey to the Centre of the Earthy invert this 
order. The Murders in the Rue Morgue^ The Mystery of Marie 
Roget^ and The Purloined Letter are all what we should call 
"detective stories," and are the forerunners of many stories 
of their kind from sensational novels up to novels of elaborate 
mystery and skill, like Wilkie Collins's Moonstone. To be 
convinced of Poe's infiuence in this field one needs only to read 
his Purloined Letter and then A Scandal in Bohemia in Dr. 
Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Several of the 
analytical tales have subsidiary elements of interest, notably 
horror in the baboon murderer of the Rue Morgue, an element 
which Mr. Kipling, with questionable art, has ventured to make 
the sole theme of his gruesome Bimi. Among the tales of adven- 
ture with a back-ground of semi-scientific speculation are Hans 
Pfaal (the story of a trip to the moon), A MS. Found in a 
Bottle., and A Descent into the Maelstrom. In the two latter, 
however, the interest of mere ingenuity is overshadowed hy the 
interest of the narratives themselves, enriched, as they are, 
with all the resources of Poe's imagination. It may well be 
that the wild fancy of a descent into the maelstrom grew pri- 
marily out of a mathematical theorem concerning the action of 
cylinders in a vortex, but the qualities that give that tale its 
distinction and its power, lifting it entirely out of its class, 
are higher than this. It is in such passages as the following, 
where subtlet}'' of analj^sis gives way before the splendor and 
majesty of the pictured scene, that we find the real genius of 
Poe: 



120 ROMANCE 

" *We are now,' he continued in that particularizing manner 
which distinguished him — ' we are now close upon the Norwegian 
coast — in the sixty-eighth degree of latitude — in the great province of 
Nordland — and in the dreary district of Lofoden, The mountain 
upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself 
up a little higher — hold on to the grass if you feel giddy— so — and 
look out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea. ' 

''I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose 
waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian 
geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more 
deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the 
right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, 
like ramparts of the world, lines of horribly black and beetling cliff, 
whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated 
by the surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly 
crest, howling and shrieking forever. . . . 

"As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and graduallj^ 
increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon 
an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what 
seamen term the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rap- 
idly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while 
I gazed this current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment 
added to its speed— to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the 
whole sea as far as Vurrgh was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it 
was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its 
sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a 
thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into frenzied convul- 
sion — heaving, boiling, hissing, — gyrating in gigantic and innumer- 
able vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with 
rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous 
descents. 

*' In a few minutes more there came over the scene another radical 
alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the 
whirlpools one by one disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam 
became apparent w^here none had been seen before. These streaks, 
at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into com- 
bination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided 
vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Sud- 
denlv — very suddenly — this assumed a distinct and definite existence 
in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl 



POE 121 

was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray*; but no particle 
of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, 
as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet- 
black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some 
forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying 
and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling 
voice, half-shriek, half-roar, such as not even the mighty cataract 
of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven. The mountain trem- 
bled to its very base, and the rock rocked." 

The allegorical tales, comparatively few in number, are weak- 
ened in point of art by their moral intent. William Wilson is 
an allegory of the two-fold nature of man — of the conflict be- 
tween the upward tendency to good and the downward tendency 
to evil. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jehyll and Mr. Hyde is 
another story with the same theme. But William Wilson, 
though written in a flowing style and with patient, deliberate 
art, is not a great tale. The moral is crystallized, not held 
in solution. What should be the undermeaning is on the sur- 
face: the tale yields to the homil}^ We note, too, an incon- 
gruous mixture of things real and things unreal. The details 
of the background are faithfully given only to be completely 
lost sight of again: they are not organic. Hence the story, 
as a story, fails. The Black (7a Hs much better, and is, indeed, 
one of Poe's best known tales. It is possible to read it and 
scarcely perceive the underlying motive of the accusing con- 
science. Its only weak point is one common to all the tales — a 
lack of characterization. Poe's characters are never real 
human beings, and no matter what atrocities they commit or 
what agonies they sulTer, we feel neither disgust nor sympathy, 
we are moved purely by the abstract horror of the situation. 
Poe lacked the tear-compelling power which even a caricaturist 
like Dickens possessed. But for naked horror The Black Cat 
is hardly to be surpassed. It certainly produces an efl'ect, and 
that, Poe declared, was the main object in most of his tales. 
The Man of the Crowd and The Tell- Tale Heart are also tales 



IL'2 ROMANCE 

of conscience, fhougii less distinctly allegorical. The Masque 
of the Rid Death is allegorical, but without moral significance, 
— the fear it symbolizes is purely physical. Bat this is another 
of Poe's most successful fantasies, at once gorgeous and 
spectral, ridiculously impossible yet awfullj^ real. 

In these several forms of narrative — the detective story, the 
tale of pseudo-science, the moral allegory — Poe's influence has 
been both wide and deep. But there is another domain in 
which his unique genius found a still higher expression and in 
which he has had no successful imitators. This is the domain 
of the supernatural. Here belong the tales of Berenice, Mor- 
cJIa, Shadow, Poe's own favorite Ligeia. and that tale which 
critical opinion commonly ranks highest — The Fall of the House 
of Usher. The motive of the two last is one of the most fan- 
tastic and terrible in the field of romance. It is the idea, 
which seems to have l)een almost a hallucination with Poe, of 
the possible life of the spirit, that is, of the thinking, sentient 
part of man, after the death of the body — not immortality, 
be it understood, but a temporary prolonging of spirit life by 
sheer power of will. Yet the motive, gruesome as it is, is 
saA^ed liy the cunning of the artist from being repulsive or 
ridiculous ; for Poe builds up, with unerring skill, his effects 
of transcendent beauty and at the same time transcendent 
horror and awe. It would be almost as difficult to say how 
the effects are produced as it would be to say why a A'iolin fan- 
tasia has the power to move or fascinate, but the perfection 
of the art that produces them is no more to be questioned in 
the one case than in the other. 

The deficiencies of the tales we must grant, though we need 
not hold the deficiencies to be defects. They contain nothing 
refreshing, nothing morally uplifting or sweetl}' humanizing. 
The sunshine is not the broad sunshine of the fields, — it comes 
sifted through dense foliage or colored glass. The winds blow 
from caverns and vaulted tombs. The color on the cheeks is 



POE 123 

hectic, the mirth is hysterical. Everywhere are grief and 
madness, disease and death. But the aesthetic passion, whicli 
supplied in Poe the place of the ethic passion, works a trans- 
figuration, making beauty even out of ugliness and ghastli- 
ness. Two or three impressions, indeed, must be left abidingly 
upon every reader of Poe's prose. First, there is the charm of 
the language itself, sometimes swift and strong, as in the 
description of the setting sun that, "a dim, silver-like rim 
alone, rushed down the unfathomable ocean," sometimes lyric 
in its melody, as in the description of ' ' Venice, a star-beloved 
Elj^sium of the sea, the wide windows of whose Palladian pal- 
aces look down with a deep and bitter meaning upon the secrets 
of her silent waters." With this goes the fascination of the 
vivid scenes, ranging from terror to beauty and sublimity. 
What a picture is that of the spectral crew: — "their knees 
trembled with infirmit}^ ; their shoulders were bent double with 
decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their 
voices were low, tremulous, and broken; their eyes glistened 
with the rheum of j^ears ; and their gray hairs streamed terribly 
in the tempest." Or who that has once seen in imagination 
ever forgets the "Valley of the Many-Colored Grass," the 
noble hall "in a dim city called Ptolemais, " the "black and 
lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre" by the melancholy 
house of Usher? Lastly, there is the magic touch, the necro- 
mancer's wand, w^hich removes all these scenes into the un- 
charted realm of the supernatural and invests them with a kind 
of sacred awe, so that one who has wandered for an hour in 
the country of Poe comes back to this every-day world like a 
dreamer and an alien. 

The poetry of Poe's mature years has the same attributes, 
only it is, as poetry should be, still more ethereal. If we had 

not come to demand so much of poetry, there could 
His Poetry. -, ,. , , . . , -^ 

be little hesitation m ranking Poe s with the veiy 

greatest in any language. But cultivated readers have fallen 



124 ROMANCE 

into the habit of searching beneath emotions for moral and 
intellectual stimulus. They want, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, 
a "criticism of life," and failing to find that, they are dissatis- 
fied. Now that, Poe cannot be said to afford — life as we know 
it he scarcely touches at all. But youth, that is always a poet 
and that knows little of definitions, reads Poe and says, ' ' This 
is pure poetry." And the test should satisfy us about Poe 
and make us doubt our definitions. Bej'ond all question, 
whatever Poe lacked — and he lacked many things — he pos- 
sessed the two fundamental attributes of a poet, melody and 
imagination, in a supreme degree. They are attributes, too, 
that speak for themselves, requiring no proof or argument. 
When TJie Raven was published in Willis's Evening Mirror in 
January, 1845, America knew for a certainty that English lit- 
erature had another poet to reckon with. The Raven immedi- 
ately became, and remains, one of the mostly widely known of 
English poems ; it can be mentioned anywhere without apology 
or explanation, and there is scarcely a lover of melodious verse 
who cannot repeat many of its lines and stanzas. Strange it 
seems that Poe's poetic genius should ever require vindication. 

It is true, the product is meagre. The Raven, The Bells, 
Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Haunted Palace, The Conqueror 
Worm, Israfel, To Helen, To One in Paradise, The City in the 
Sea — one can almost count on the fingers his great poems. 
But that is true of many notable poets, even where the product 
is large. Poe's trash (certain stanzas, for instance, in For 
Annie) is very sorry trash, but there is not a great deal of it, 
and there is practically no mediocre verse. What is good 
touches the high watermark of excellence. 

And its quality is unmistakable. Its appeal is to the sen- 
timent of Beauty — the one appeal which, according to Poe's 
theory, is the final justification of any poem. Language is 
made to peld its utmost of melody. From words, even from 
letters, one might say — for Poe actually fabricated words 



POE 125 

whose sounds would suit his purpose— effects are wrested such 
as had never been wrested before. 

'' The skies they were ashen and sober; 

Tlie leaves they were crisp&d and sere, — 

The leaves they were withering and sere, — 
It was night in the lonesome October 

Of my most immemorial year; 
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, 

In the misty mid-region of AVeir, — 
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, 

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." 

This is haunting music, though here again, as in the tales, if 
we seek to know precisely how the effect is secured, we are 
baffled. The ordinar}^ devices of alliteration, refrains, and 
repetends, are freely used, but no mere resort to those de\ices 
can parallel the effect. The truth is, the verse is not only 
haunting, but haunted. In it is the strange, unearthly imagery, 
and over it is the spectral light, that only Poe's imagination 
could create. To a beauty of language, by its very nature as 
indescribable as music, is added a weird enchantment of scene 
that vanishes before any attempt to reclothe it in other words. 
Anah'sis and criticism are helpless before this final achieve- 
ment of Poe's art — the creation of that "supernal loveliness" 
which, he declared, it is the struggle of all fit souls to appre- 
hend. 

Beyond this we may scarcely go. There are dark hints of 
other things in Poe's poetry. The Raven of his dreams is, in 
the words of Mr. Stedman, ' ' an emblem of the Irreparable, 
the guardian of pitiless memories." The Haunted Palace and 
the Conqueror Worm have a direct and almost frightful alle- 
gorical significance. And what music may not come from the 
lute of Israfel, what hopes are not barred by the legended 
tomb of Ulaluijie? But we gain little from the study of these 
things, indeed we almost resent any covert significance. For 
of Poe's poetry, as of his highest prose, it must be said that it 



126 ROMANCE 

makes almost no moral appeal. Nothing is conceived on a 
moral plane. He has nothing to teach us — no mission, no 
message. But the sounds and the visions remain, the poet's 
mastery over the secrets of the terrible, the mysterious, the 
sublime, and the beautiful; and we may well rest content to 
listen without questions to the wild measures of Israfel's lute, 
to gaze awe-stricken upon the city in the sea, or to pass speech- 
less by the dim lake of Auber and through the ghoul-haunted 
woodland of Weir. 

By all that has been said, Poe's romantic temper is made 

plain. It does not betray itself in any dominant love for nature, 

nor in any tender sentimentalizing, but rather in a 

oes Position pg^ggJQjj f^^, ^^^ antique, the highly adorned, the odd, 

m Literature. ^ u 5 & j 5 j 

the gloomy, the marvellous, — in a word, for that 
"strangeness in beauty" which Mr. Pater, borrowing a phrase 
from Bacon, has declared to be the distinctive romantic note. 
Poe was passionately fond of mystery, and he was drawn irre- 
sistibly to the supreme mysteries of life and death. In so far 
as his work is morbidly psychological, it allies him with Charles 
Brockden Brown, and through him with the metaphysical 
school of Grodwin, though Poe's imagination was of a higher 
order. If we must name any prototype, it would be Coleridge. 
But Poe was Poe. We may account for Longfellow, for Haw- 
thorne, for Emerson; but the individual note, the "inexpress- 
ible monad" which evolutionary science itself as yet fails to 
account for, was peculiarly strong in Poe, and we must leave 
him underived. Abroad he has long been considered as a 
creative writer of the first rank. It is to the shame of Ameri- 
cans that they have seldom been able to take quite his full 
measure ; but our best critics have been instinctively attracted 
to him, and it is worthy of note that his works have lately 
been honored with a scholarly and fairly definitive critical edi- 
tion — an honor which, not to consider statesmen, like Franklin, 



FROM SOUTH TO NORTH 127 

or the earl}" historians or theologians, has fallen to no other 
American man of letters. 

FROM SOUTH TO NORTH 

Our review of the minor fiction that was produced contem- 
poraneously with the earliest and, in general, the best work of 
Cooper closed with the record of one writer of the region south 
of New York — John Pendleton Kennedy, of Baltimore. Ac- 
companying and following Kennedy, whose activity in fiction 
was not long continued, were several writers who availed them- 
selves, like him, of the romantic possibilities of their environ- 
ment, and so became, in their modest way, more distinctively 
romancers of the South than Poe, whose genius was really of no 
land or clime. One of these was a certain Dr. Bird, of Del- 
aware and Philadelphia, an early explorer of the 
gomery Bird, Mammoth Cave, and an industrious writer of 
i803-i8o4. tragedies and tales. Two romances of Mexico — 
Calavar (1834) and The Infidel (1835) — received high praise 
from Prescott; and the once famous Kentucky romance, Nick 
of the Woods, or the Jihhenalnosay (1837), had the merit of por- 
traying the North American savages without any of Cooper's 
idealization. 

The writer of the South, however, who was most genuinely 
moved by its romantic scenes and legends, and who succeeded 
William Gil- ^^ doing for colonial and border life there a service 
more simms, similar to that Cooper did for the North, was Wil- 
liam Grilmore Simms, of Charleston, South Carolina. 
Simms began his career as a lawyer, but soon adopted the pro- 
fession of journalism and literature. To the end he remained 
a professional author, writing both poetry and prose with 
great facility — romance, drama, history, and criticism. His 
published works number over sixty titles. Perhaps the best 
of his romances is The Yemassce, published in 1835, a tale of 
the war in 1715 between the early CaroUna settlers and the 



128 ROMANCE 

Indians. Others are Guy Rivers (1834), a tale of Georgia; 
The Partisan (1835), a tale of Marion's men; Mellicha.mpe 
(1836), another tale of the Revolution; and Beauchamj)e (1842), 
a tale of Kentucky. Hastily written, his stories are naturall}' 
deficient in the higher qualities of construction and style, but 
they have plenty of vigor and imaginative color, and their 
A^ogue is still great enough to warrant their publication in 
fairly complete editions. 

To New York belonged several writers of tales of adventure 
whose scenes were laid on shipboard or in remote quarters of 
wir mst ^^^ earth. One of these was Dr. Mayo, the author 
buck Mayo, of KaloolaTi (1849), an extravagant story of Yankee 
1812-1895. exploration in the wilds of Africa. Another, and 

Herman Mel- ^ ' 

viiie, 1819- more important, was Herman Melville, who in his 

1891. 

youth embarked upon a whaling vessel bound for 

the Pacific and spent several years, a portion of the time in 

captivity, among the South Sea Islands. The series of partly 

fanciful tales founded upon his experiences — Typee (1846), 

Omoo (1847), Mohy Dick, or the White Whale (1851), etc.,— 

had a wide circulation, and an occasional* admirer can still be 

found who will pronounce them superior to Cooper's. They 

differ from Cooper's tales of the sea in that thej^ portray, not 

the life of the merchant or the naval officer, but the life of the 

common sailor who ships " before the mast." 

Superior, however, to all these tales in quality, and scarcely 

inferior in romantic interest, is the wholly truthful narrative 

„. ^ ^ ^ of Two Years Before the Mast. It was written by 
Richard Henry '' "^ 

Dana, Jr., Richard Henry Dana, Jr. , son of the author of The 
1815-1882. Buccaneers, and was published in 1840. Obliged 
by some weakness of the eyes to suspend his course of studies 
at Harvard, Dana went to sea in the American merchant ser- 
Adce, and of the faithful record of his experiences in the 
journey around Cape Horn and trading up and down the coast 
of California he made a book that in its fascination for youth- 



HAWTHORNE 129 

ful readers is a rival not only of Cooper's stories but almost 
of Rohiason Crusoe itself. 

Few romances of the extravagant type came out of New 
England. Even Dana's narrative — for Dana was a New Eng- 
lander — had the warrant of truth. For the justification of 
fiction the warrant of a moral purpose might serve, but pure 
physical adventure for the mere entertainment of it was little 
likely to be tolerated. And so, as we search among the minor 
romancers of New England, we find only such writers as Wil- 
liam Ware and Sylvester Judd, both Unitarian 
1797-1852. ministers, and both writers who enlisted romance 
Sylvester judd,\ji the cause of religion. Ware's books — Zenobia 
{Qrst printed as Letters from Palmyra, 1837), Aure- 
lian (first printed as P7'o6z<s, 1838), and Julian {1^41) — portray, 
with considerable learning and imagination, the conflict of Chris- 
tianity and paganism in the days of the decline of Rome. It is the 
type of romance since made familiar to us by the greater work 
of the English Kingsley and the German Ebers. Judd's one 
book of importance was Margaret, a Tale of the Real and the 
Ideal (1845), a story at once more realistic and more fantastic 
than Ware's stories. In spite of its crudeness and prolixity, 
it long held a respectable place on New England bookshelves, 
both for its vigorous portraiture of Maine life and scenery and 
for the rare spirituality which it throws about its central char- 
acter. Lowell's rather extravagant praise of it, in his Fable 

for Critics, as 

" the first Yankee book 
With the soul of Down East in't, and things farther East," 

doubtless prolonged its life. About all we care to preserve 
of it is a certain description of a snowstorm which has often 
been reprinted and which may well be read for its own sake. 

NATHANIEL HAWTEOBNE, 1804-1864 

From writeTs like those just described it is not difficult to 
make the transition to the most spiritual of American roman- 



130 ROMANCE 

cers — Nathaniel Hawthorne. And it should be noted in passing 
that we have returned once more, and for a long stay, to New 
England soil. For, after Poe, the names of first importance 
that follow immediately in the wake of those pioneers of our 
literature who were considered in the preceding chapter, belong 
almost without exception to New England. The old centre 
of literary activit}^ regains its prestige: New York, Philadel- 
phia, and Baltimore yield to Boston, Cambridge, and Concord, 
and we confront that remarkable group of men who have 
stamped our literature with their own characteristics of 
courage, manliness, and ideality. Why the New England 
literary spirit should have lain so comparatively dormant 
during the early years of our nationality is not easy to say. 
Of course there could not be any high development of 
literature without a highly developed sense of art, and we have 
seen that the Puritan temper was hostile to art, as something 
savoring of luxury and vain-glory, or even idolatry. The 
Puritan spirit was easily aroused in a moral cause, hardly 
in an aesthetic one. And we cannot fail to note that even of 
this great group of New Engianders who gaA^e us the body, 
as it were, of our nineteenth century literature, the majority 
were primarily scholars, thinkers, and moralists, and only 
secondarily artists. Emerson, Thoreau, Webster, Whittier, 
Lowell, even Holmes, fought in some cause of freedom or 
righteousness. Only Longfellow in poetry and Hawthorne 
in prose held steadfastly to the fundamental principles 
of creation for artistic ends; and Longfellow's scholastic and 
didactic instincts are never far from the surface, while in Haw- 
thorne the moral purpose comes plainly into sight. The 
romance, however, in the choice of which as the sole medium 
of his expression Hawthorne stands apart from the rest of the 
group, is essentially a form of pure art, and that fact Haw- 
thorne never allowed himself to forget. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born at Salem, Massachusetts, 



HAWTHORNE 131 

July 4, 1804. The absence of a clerical ancestry in his case is 
„ ^ ^ noteworthy, as also in the case of Lon2:fellow, the 

Boyhood. '^ ' & j 

other of the great New England writers in whom we 

have just remarked that the artistic bent was not subordinate to 
the ethical. Hawthorne's ancestors were magistrates, soldiers, 
and seamen; one of them, a judge during the witchcraft trials, 
dealt so harshly with an accused woman as to call down upon 
his head a curse, and from the story of that curse sprang in 
good time Tlie Home of the Seven GahJes. The father was a 
sea-captain who died of a fever at Surinam in 1808. The 
mother spent the remainder of her life — forty 3'ears — in the 
closest seclusion, and the little Nathaniel and his two sisters 
would have had a dark time of it but for the mother's family, 
the Mannings, with whom they went to live. In 1813 they 
removed to the Manning estate on the Sebago Lake in Maine, 
and it is there that Hawthorne's happiest years were spent. 
The lonely life of nature, where in summer he roamed through 
the woods with his gun, or in winter skated on the lake until 
midnight, was at least better for him than the lonel}^, unsocial 
life of the town — all the better, perhaps, in view of his delicate 
health and his confessed "grievous disinclination to go to 
school." In due time, however, he was sent back to Salem to 
prepare for college, whence he wrote letters of playful com- 
plaint to his mother: 

" I am quite reconciled to going to college, since I am to spend 
vi\y vacation with you. Yet four years of the best part of my life is a 
great deal to throw away. I have not yet concluded what profession 
I shall have. . . . Oh that I were rich enough to live without a 
profession ! What do you think of my becoming an author, and 
relying for support upon my pen?" 

A beautiful and somewhat wilful youth, whose discipline 
had been neglected, he was not always easy to manage, in 
school or out, and during his residence at Bowdoin College he 
showed some of the same tendencies as Poe toward dissipation, 



132 EOMAXCE 

at least in its milder forms. But he possessed an essentially uobk 
nature and there were no lasting e^il results. His more inti- 
mate college mates were Franklin Pierce and Horatio Bridge 
(see the dedication of The Snow Imarje). Longfellow was a 
classmate, but there was probably not enough in common 
between him and Longfellow, who was several years his junior, 
to draw them closely together, though then and in later life 
their relations were always cordial. 

After his graduation from Bowdoin in 1825, Hawthorne 

entered upon, or rather drifted into, a strange mode of life. 

Though strong, active, and apparentlv well fitted to do 

Seclusion. -, . -, n -.^ -, -,, -,-,•" it -t- 

his share 01 the world s work, he virtually disappeared 

from the world for a period of twelve or fourteen years. In 
the seclusion of his Salem home, ' ' bj' some witchcraft or other 
can'ied apart from the main current of life.'' in a family whose 
members were in the habit of taking their meals in their private 
rooms, scarcely, he declared, seeing his elder sister in three 
months, avoiding societv and walkino; out bv night, he was left 
to pursue whatever course of intellectual work or idleness his 
fancy prompted. He was actually accomplishing far more 
than he would have then dared to believe. He could dream 
undisturbed; he was quietly gathering a precious store of 
material, some of which may be read now in the American 
Note Boohs: he was slowly perfecting himself in the art of com- 
position : and above all he was developing the individual traits 
of his genius in a way that would have been practically 
impossible had he been surrounded, like Longfellow and 
Lowell, by the diverse influences of travel and men and books. 
He had no very definite purpose. He wrote without encourage- 
ment and almost without hope. A little collection of seven 
tales was sent, we are told, to seventeen pnl:>lishers without 
success. One hundred dollars secured the publication of 
FansJiaice in 1828. but afterward all the copies of this '-literary 
folly'" that could be found were destroyed. Some later tales 



HAWTHORNE 133 

fared better. Goodrich published The Gentle Boy and three 
others anonymously in his annual, The Token^ for 1832. 
Others appeared in succeeding issues of that annual and in 
various other magazines. This, added to the help of his 
friend Bridge, paved the way for the publication, in 1837, 
of the first series of Twice- Told Tales. Longfellow wrote a 
f aA^orable review of the volume for the North American Review 
(July, 1837), and six hundred copies of the book were sold. 

The encouragement of this modest success, which yielded 
him, by the way, no money, had something to do with drawing 

him out of his seclusion, though it may be imagined 
Ventures ^^^^ ^^® process was not easy. ' 'I have made a 

captive of myself, ' ' he wrote to Longfellow, ' ' and 
put me into a dungeon ; and now I cannot find the key to let 
myself out." But the key was found. For a hint of the man- 
ner, read the entry in the American Note Books under October 
4, 1840. Miss Elizabeth Peabody had discovered Hawthorne 
through his writings, and Hawthorne, through Miss Elizabeth 
Peabody, had discovered her beautiful and gifted young invalid 
sister, Sophia Peabody. The deep affection that sprung up be- 
tween these two was the spur so much needed. The first result 
was decidedly practical. Hawthorne secured a position, which 
he held for two years, as weigher and ganger in the Boston 
Custom House under G-eorge Bancroft, — a position in which he 
learned with a kind of amused surprise that there are other 
"duties" in this world besides moral and religious ones. The 
next result was more visionary. In 1841 he joined the experi- 
menters at Brook Farm, an agricultural community established 
under the leadership of George Ripley.* He spent a fairly 
happy 3^ear there, but abandoned his investment of a thousand 
dollars the second spring, satisfied that it was not the life for 
him. He learned a little about farming — that is to say, he 

* See Chapter VI. 



134 ROMANCE 

hoed potatoes and milked cows — and a gi'eat deal about 
human nature, and he carried away experiences that were later 
woven into The BUtliedalc Romance. 

In 1842 he manied Sophia Peabody and took up, courage- 
ously enough, a life of poverty, hard literary work, and per- 
fect domestic happiness at Concord.* in the Old 
Manse, which had already been Emerson's home. 
There he came to know and value the friendship of Emerson, 
who, we may well believe, was the inspiration of the allegory 
of The Great Stone Face. Thoreau on a time sold him a boat; 
and there are memories of all three skatins; on the river — 
Emerson wearily. Hawthorne gracefully. Thoreau fantastically. 
There, too, he was brought into some contact with Alcott and 
Margaret Fuller and. in short, the whole circle of Concord 
• • philosophers. '" He published a second volume of Ticice-Told 
Tales in 1842 and Mosses from an Old Manse in 1846. In the 
latter year an appointment to the Custom House at Salem, 
under the Democratic administration of Polk, took him back to 
his native town. His duties there gave him little time for 
writing, and when, three years later, a change of administra- 
tion left him again without a position, his wife said to him 
encouragingly. --Now you can write your book 1"' The book 
thus referred to was promptly written, and early in 1850 ten 
thousand people, in America and England, were reading The 
Scarlet Letter — up to the present day, it is scarcely too much to 
affiiTQ, the central book of American literature. It is possible 
that, if this success had been anticipated — and there was nothing 
in Hawthorne's earlier experience to lead to such an anticipa- 
tion — he would have touched more liglitly certain passages in the 
introductory sketch of the Custom House. However that be, 



*Ttiis Concord, so famous in American letters, is the Massachusetts Concord, 
also famous in American history, and is not to be confounded with the Xew 
Hampshire capital. 



HAWTHORNE 135 

the sketch gave considerable offense to his Salem fellow-towns- 
men, and it was therefore not without satisfaction on his part 
that he carried out plans already made for a final removal from 
the place. He cherished no ill-will; and Salem, on her part, 
has since been proud to point out the site of the Town Pump 
and the House of the Seven Gables. 

The story of the remainder of his life may be briefly told. 

With his family (there were two children, Una and Julian — 

Rose was born shortly afterward), he removed first 

Wanderings ^^ Lenox, among the Berkshire Hills in Western 
and Death. ' ^ 

Massachusetts. The House of the Seven Gables, pub- 
lished in 1851, was written there; there too w^ere written 
and read and re-read to the children before publication The 
Wonder-Book and The Snow Image and Other Twice- Told 
Tales. The next move was to West Newton, a suburb of 
Boston, and thence, in 1852, back to Concord, where he had 
purchased Alcott's house, which he named "The Wayside." 
The Blithedale Romance appeared in that j^'ear, and Tanglewood 
Tales in the following. Then came his appointment as consul at 
Liverpool under the administration of his old friend, Franklin 
Pierce. After four years in England he resigned his consulship 
and spent several years in travel on the continent, passing two 
winters at Rome. Here The Marble Faun was conceived (his 
own daughter, Una, was the model of the spiritual Hilda), to 
be written out at Florence and in England, and published at 
London and Boston in 1860. The title of the English edition 
was Transformation, In June of 1860 he returned to Concord. 
More literary work was projected — Septimius Felton, The Dol- 
liver Romance, Dr. Grimshawe^s Secret — but it was not his for- 
tune to write any more in peace, and nothing was completed. 
He was deeply agitated by the Civil War, the more so because 
his sympathies were not wholly with his Northern friends ; he 
was in constant concern for the health of his idolized Una ; 
and his own health was rapidly failing. In March, 1864, at 



136 KOMANCE 

the urgent desire of his friends, he set out for the South in the 
companionship of his publisher, W. D. Ticknor, only to see 
Ticknor die suddenly at Philadelphia. A few weeks later he 
and ex-President Pierce started northward on a similar excur- 
sion. But Ticknor's fate became also his own. He died peace- 
fully, on the nineteenth of May, in a hotel at Plymouth, New 
Hampshire. Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Pierce, Agassiz, 
Lowell, Holmes, and many other friends stood by the grave 
where he was buried at Concord, on the "hill- top hearsed with 
pines." The unfinished Dolliver Romance lay on his coffin dur- 
ing the funeral; and shortly afterward Longfellow wrote his 
beautiful tribute: — 

*' Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, 
And the lost clew regain? 
The unfinished wdndow in Aladdin's tower 
Unfinished must remain." 

As the years go by, it becomes more and more apparent that 
Hawthorne's is quite the rarest genius that has been fostered on 

the bleak New England shore. To analyze that 
f/Iim^^^^^^ genius, or even to appraise it rightly, is no easy task. 

Yet the task is rendered less difficult by the essen- 
tially simple nature of the man. From first to last Hawthorne 
worked steadfastly in a single direction. One concession to 
friendship he made when he wrote a campaign biography of 
Franklin Pierce, and another later when he dedicated to the 
same friend the fruits of his consular experience — the charm- 
ing sketches of English life and scenery in Our Old Home. 
Apart from these, he never allowed himself to be enticed from 
the path along which his genius urged him. He seemed to 
understand precisely the nature, if not entirely the scope, of 
his powers; and he never felt around for something better or 
easier or pleasanter to do. He burned many manuscripts, but 
they were all experiments in the one direction of prose, romance, 



HA.WTHORNE 137 

the necessary apprentice work by which he perfected himself 
in his difficult art. Even the various Note Books that were 
published after his death were but gathered threads of experi- 
ence to be woven at a favorable opportunity into the magic 
web of his dreams. 

On the basis of form it is possible to make a division of 

his imaginative work into short tales and long romances, 

though their substantial singleness of character 
Tales 

remains. The tales were written and published 

at intervals through the early and middle portions of his life. 
Some of the lightest and brightest were directly addressed to 
children — the pleasant little histories and biographies of 
Grandfather's Chair ^ and the delightful modernized versions 
of Greek and Roman myths in the Wonder-Book and Tangle- 
wood Tales. Stronger, and higher in aim, are the eighty or 
more narratives and sketches that make up the several volumes 
of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. Very 
slight is the material of which most of them are constructed — 
an image of snow, a profile-shaped mass of rock, a toll-gatherer 
on his bridge, an old witch and her pipe, an artist making a 
mechanical butterfly. Yet they hold us both by the variety of 
their outward charm andjby their deep inner significance. 
They run through the whole gamut of fancy, from the wildly 
whimsical and humorous to the intensely sombre and pro- 
foundly sad. And woven into them, as the very life and sub- 
stance of them, are speculations upon many of the gravest 
problems of existence. Indeed, more of the spiritual history 
of New England may be found in a single tale like Young 
Goodman Broian or The Minister's Black Veil, than in a hun- 
dred sermons of the theologians. The material setting is soon 
discovered to be only a screen upon which to throw the spirit- 
ual portrait. 

The long romances, of which but four stand completed. 



138 ROMANCE 

differ from the tales chiefly in their greater elaborateness and 
sharper delineation of character. The Scarlet Letter 
was the first to be written and published. Poking 
among the documentar}^ rubbish of the custom house at Salem, 
the author had brought to light a mysterious scrap of old 
scarlet cloth with a few pages of explanatory record. Im- 
mediately his imagination began to work. Out of the haze of 
two centuries the New England of the days when Richard 
Bellingham sat in the governor's chair gradually arose; the 
streets of Boston were peopled with hooded women, and bearded 
men in steeple-crowned hats; the jail, the pillory, the whip- 
ping-post, the finger of scorn, the badge of dishonor — all the 
grim accessories of the Puritan tribunal of justice, became 
once more as things of reality ; and upon this background was 
projected the sorrowful drama of two sinning human hearts, 
the one persecuted and the other self-tormented even beyond 
their sinnins^. Such was the substance of Tlie Scarlet Letter. 
a chapter out of old Puritan life in New England, the work of 
a professed romancer, creating and analyzing rather than 
recording, yet more compelling in its truthfulness than the 
most painstaking of histories. 

Perhaps no one of the three other romances quite equals 
The Scarlet Letter in imaginative insight or dramatic intensity, 
though taken together they show better the range of the 
author's genius. The House of the Seven Gables, which is 
likely to yield greater pleasure to the ordinary reader, pre- 
sents a more modern phase of the old New England life, with 
somewhat less of analysis and more of movement. The 
Blithedale Romance strikes farthest out of the Hawthomian 
track, coming humanly near to our work-a-day world and 
presenting characters that seem almost more real than the 
real men and women, now fading into shadows, who once 
peopled the high-hearted community at Brook Farm. The 
Marhle Faun, which was written last, during the years abroad, 



i 



HAWTHORNE 139 

differs outwardly from the others in having its scene laid in 
Italy, and the story resolves itself into what, for those who 
do not understand the purposes of Hawthorne, is only tantaliz- 
ing mystery. Yet it, like the others, is devoted to the illum- 
ination of moral problems, and the characters are delineated 
with the same strength and delicacy, while in some of its 
aspects it reveals the handiwork of a man still further enriched 
by knowledge and ripened by experience. 

The final seal of security upon Hawthorne's work is the style 
in which it is written. Airy, sparkling, graceful, flowing, 

pellucid — the style is all these and much more. 
style. fl -^ 

Hawthorne plays upon language as upon an instru- 
ment of many stops, and the swiftest changes, from irony to 
pity and from humor to pathos, are made without a discordant 
note. Better, however, than any description will be an 
example; and we choose, from The House of the Seven Gables^ 
the picture of the hard-hearted Judge Pj^ncheon overtaken by 
the ancestral curse and sitting dead in his chair while one 
by one the hours of his appointments to business duties or 
social pleasures creep steadily by: 

"Well! it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, 
tautog, woodcock, boiled turkey, Southdown mutton, pig, roast 
beef, have vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm 
potatoes, and gravies crusted over with cold fat. The judge, had he 
done nothing else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and 
fork. It was he, you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference 
to his ogre-like appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, 
but that the dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his 
large sensual endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding 
time. But, for once, the judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too 
late, we fear, even to join the party at their wine! The guests are 
warm and merry; they have given up the judge; and, concluding 
that the free-soilers have him, they will fix upon another candidate. 
Were our friend now to stalk in among them, with that wide-open 
stare, at once wild and stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt 
to change their cheer. Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, 



140 ROMANCE 

generally so scrupulous in his attire, to show himself at a dinner- 
table with that crimson stain upon his shirt-bosom. By-the-by. how 
came it there? It is an ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way 
for the judge is to button his coat closely over his breast, and, tak- 
ing his horse and chaise from the livery-stable, to make all speed to 
his own house. There, after a glass of brandy and water, and a 
mutton-chop, a beef-steak, a broiled fowl, or some such hasty little 
dinner and supper all in one, he had better sx)end the evening by the 
fire-side. He must toast his slippers a long while, in order to get rid 
of the chilliness which the air of this vile old house has sent curdling 
through his veins. 

*'U"p, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up I You have lost a day. But 
to-morrow will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the 
most of it? To-morrow! To-morrow! To-morrow! We, that are 
alive, may rise betimes to-morrow. As for him that has died to- 
day, his morrow will be the resurrection morn. 

"Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners 
of the room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at 
first become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their 
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were, 
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human 
figure sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from 
without; it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own in- 
evitable time, will possess itself of everything. Tlie judge's face, 
indeed, rigid, and singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal 
solvent. Fainter and fainter grows the light. It is as if another 
double handful of darkness had been scattered through the air. 
Now it is no longer gray, but sable. There is still a faint appearance 
at the window; neither a glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,— any 
phrase of light would express something far brighter than this 
doubtful perception, or sense, rather, that there is a window there. 
Has it yet vanished? No! — yes! — not quite! And there is still the 
swarthy whiteness — we shall venture to marry these iU-agreeing 
words — the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon' s face. The 
features are all gone; there is only the paleness of them left. And 
how looks it now? There is no window! There is no face! An in- 
finite inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! "Where is our 
universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift, in chaos, may 
hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmur- 
ing about in quest of what was once a world!" 



HAWTHORNE 141 

Hawthorne's romanticism, to turn from his style to the atmos- 
phere which envelops tales and romances alike, is of a peculiar 
type, strangely linking the past with the present and the re- 
„. .,,., , mote with the near. The German romantic move- 

IIi8 Attitude 

foimrd ment, with its return to feudalism and mysticism, 

and Longfellow, under the enchantment of medijeval history 
and legend. True, he named his eldest daughter "Una", after 
Spenser's heroine, but only "to take the name out of the realm 
of Faery." Certain old superstitions had a charm for him — 
witchcraft, for instance, and demonology; and his fancy was 
continually playing with the pseudo-science of alchc^my. JJut 
these things were used only for tlusir symbolism — he never 
took them seriously; he might have borrowed from Ariosto or 
Cervantes the suspicion of bantc^r in his tone. 

We might liken him to Brockden Brown, if Brown had not 
attempted to construct spiritual dramas out of such forced 
and mechanical situations. Or we might liken him to Poe, 
who was fully his equal in art, if only Poe had imported more 
of the human element into his eerie fancies. Two points of con- 
tact with those strange spirits he certainly had, — his proneness 
to psychological analysis, and his preference of that mysterious 
border land of human life which, if we may not call it the super- 
natural, we must yet call the preternatural. * He felt assured 
that there are more things in heaven and (uirth than were 
dreamed of in the philosophy of the utilitarians. The world 
of hard matter-of-fact, of cold calculation of daily needs, of 
supply and demand, of use, of convenience, of profit, was not 
the world to engage his fancy. We cannot imagine him 
making a novel out of a journalist's career or laying his scenes 

*It Is Interesting to note that one of two poems which ho appears to 
have written Is In the measure and much in the spirit of ColcridsQ' s Ancient 
Mariner. See Stedman's American Anthology. 



142 ROMANCE 

in the wheat pit or the divorce court. The realists might have 

the real world and welcome ; he preferred that twilight world 

of the fancy where objects take on all the strange shapes 

imaginable, and where, if beauty is not, we can still create it 

at will. 

Yet his work, as has been hinted, is never without ground 

in actuality. He may see fantastic visions in the clouds, but his 

feet are always on the earth. He treads airily but 

Both Idealist securely. He was afraid of mysticism; he shied at 
and Realist. "^ -^ ' 

transcendentalism, though caught for a time by 

one of its vagaries. Dreams were very fine, as dreams, but he 
soon saw the mistake of confounding them with realit}^ — a 
lesson learned possibly at Brook Farm. At any rate, he came 
to know accurately the line that divides the ideal from the 
real. It is true there are many things in his tales that will not 
square with experience. Whoever reads for the first time 
Featliertop, or Young Goodman Brown, or The Snow Image^ or 
The Birth-3fark, or Rappaccini's Daughter, is likely to rub his 
eyes to see if he is awake. Donatello's ears are a perpetual 
mystery. But we soon learn the symbolic intent of these wild 
fancies. Often, indeed, Hawthorne entirely rationalizes the 
fancies, or leaves them with but a faint suggestion of the mir- 
aculous. Maule's well turned bitter when a house was built over 
Maule's unquiet grave ; but we are reminded that the sources 
might have been disturbed in digging the deep foundations. 
It is to such methods as this, of which our example is but one 
of a hundred, methods which Brown used so bunglingly, 
that Hawthorne owes his secure tread. However wide the 
excursion of his fancy, he is careful not to lose the way; and 
so he never loses even the most prosaic reader's confidence. 
This is his immense advantage over Poe. 

A further proof of Hawthorne's foot-hold in actuality is to 
be found in some of his chosen themes and scenes. His love 
for nature never amounted to a passion, whether sentimental or 



HAWTHORNE 143 

scientific, but he was acutely sensitive to the charms of outdoor 
life, as a dozen sympathetic sketches like Buds and Bird Voices 
and The Old Manse testify. He localizes strongly, too. His 
Old Manse stands in marked contrast to the Domain of Arnheim 
or the Landor's Cottage of Poe's dreams. Ethan Brand, we 
know, was, in spite of his diabolical laugh, a plain man who 
burned lime in the New England hills; but who was Roderick 
Usher and where did he dwell? The Great Stone Face may 
be seen to-da}^ ; who but Poe ever saw the Masquers of the Red 
Death? And there are the Town Pump and the Salem Custom 
House and the Catacombs of Rome. Assuredly, in its exter- 
nal features, this world of Hawthorne's romances is our world, 
though it must be admitted, too, that there is always some- 
thing added or something taken away that makes it seem like 
another world. Of course there is idealization. We are not to 
suppose that Blithedale is an absolutely faithful picture of 
Brook Farm. Donatello the Faun bears little resemblance to 
Maurice Hewlett's Italians. And The Scarlet Letter^ with its 
scene laid at the author's very door, reverts to the New Eng- 
land of the past, where the fancy can at need escape from the 
bounds of the actual. We readily perceive the difference when 
we pass from the prologue of the Custom House to the story 
proper. Yet The Scarlet Letter is a tale that by idealizing 
attains a more perfect verisimilitude than is ever attained by 
photographic realism, becoming, one must almost think, the 
final portrayal of Puritanism. 

The characters of the stories, which are always few in 
number, may be best described as possessing precisely this 
same peculiarity of seeming at once real and unreal. They act 
normallj" and rationally. They move amid natural surround- 
ings. They say "Grood morning," and "Ah, I see," and 
"Shut the door." They are neither like the caricatures of 
Dickens nor like the impossible creatures of the old romances, 
who are alwa5's doing impossible things. But neither are 



144 ROMANCE 

they like the characters of the realists; that is to say, they 
are not exactly the sort of people we have met or ever quite 
expect to meet. It is because, as we have seen, Hawthorne 
preferred to move in that border land of spiritual life where 
fancy and speculation will always run in advance of observa- 
tion and knowledge. He does not shun the actual; he simply 
rejects a large part of the actions and motives that enter into 
every-day life as unsuited to his purpose, and allows his 
characters to be governed in every thought and deed by those 
principles of good or evil conduct which the ordinary man 
knows well enough, but of which he is most of the time 
scarcely conscious. There is in his characters so much of 
the truth of inner life that they seem to be untrue to outer life 
without reall}^ being so. One wonders how, shyly and aloof 
as he lived, he came to understand so well the heart of man. 
One is • tempted to say that by some special dispensation 
he was given worldly wisdom without contact with the world. 
Contact he undoubtedly had in his unobtrusive way — in his 
walks through New England and in his Custom House and 
consular life. But it need not have been extensive ; one exper- 
ience would enrich him more than a dozen would enrich other 
men. His Note Books, the great key to his character, show 
this: his habit of noting and meditating made each single 
experience fruitful. His imagination, too, enabled him to learn 
as by divination. He did not need to fight a duel; his friend 
Cilley fell in a duel and he got the whole spiritual experience. 
We know that he had, however it was obtained, that admix- 
ture of worldliness so necessary to breadth of genius. 

Yet catholic as were his sympathies, it was the darker phases 

of the interior drama that moved him when he came to write. 

Balzac wrote what he called the Human Comedy. 

The Shadow Hawthome's work, so much narrower in scope and 

of Puritamsm. ' ^ ^ 

SO much more intense in its seizure of sin and sor- 
row, grappling with moral problems often to the exclusion of 







NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



HENRY DAVID THOREATJ 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 



HAWTHORNE 145 

intellectual and aesthetic ones, might well be called the Human 
Tragedy. He has sometimes been described as morbid, but 
that is not the right word. His own tone and attitude are 
thoroughly healthy, though he does not always keep in the 
sunshine. There is a large leaven of humor in his work, and 
humor of the most genuine, spontaneous kind. It would be 
interesting, if we had space, to follow it through such a book 
as The House of the Seven Gables, from the early chapters 
where it bubbles genially over the little boy and his weakness 
for gingerbreads, to the final phases of its subdued yet 
pitiless play about the stricken Judge. Yet even there it only 
serves to throw the overhanging shadow of the book into 
darker relief. And Hawthorne knew it. He longed to write 
"a sunshiny book." It was not that he loved the gloom, 
as the term " morbid" would seem to imply, but only that he 
could not shut his eyes to it. 

Beyond question, the one fact of life and the world which 
to Hawthorne looms larger than all others, is the fact of sin. 
This, too, is the Puritan inheritance, though he is so far 
emancipated as to see the sin of Puritanism itself, and in The 
Scarlet Letter the sin of Hester Prynne pales before the sin of 
her Puritan persecutors. But the shadows have only shifted 
— in one form or another the problem of evil holds for him an 
unconquerable fascination. In Ethan Brand he plays with the 
idea of the Unpardonable Sin, which he logically enough makes 
to be the continual barring out of good influences. In The 
House of the Seven Gables it is the problem of inherited evil 
tendencies, made into romance by the fiction of an ancestral 
curse. In The Scarlet Letter it is the sin of nature against 
conscience, offset by the sins of social and religious creed 
against nature, and complicated by the sins of hypocrisy and 
reveno;e. In The Marble Faun it is the old drama of the 
temptation and the fall of man. Yet these sombre themes 
are not used to morbid ends. Sin itself is clearly shown 



146 ROMANCE 

to be educative, pla3'ing a useful part in the beneficent 
plan of the world. It does not, of course, lead to happi- 
ness, for the suffering and sorrow are uecessarj' parts of the 
education; but we mark Hester Prynue's broadened and 
sweetened nature, and we know that Arthur Dimmesdale 
the innocent would never have attained to the spiritualitj^ of 
Arthur Dimmesdale the guilt3\ And Donatello, the happ}', 
the ignorant, the child-like, the faun-like, loves, commits mur- 
der, and steps at once into the common human inheritance of 
knowledge and sorrow and hope. It is of such material as 
this that the world's great books are made. 

We have alread}" spoken of Hawthorne's style. Let a final 
word be said of his art in its larger aspects. The secret of its 

greatness lies in the fact that it is not something 
His Art. 

added to the man, but that, however carefully culti- 
vated, it is at bottom a genuine self-expression. When a Long- 
fellow writes a poem like Hiawatha we admire the art, but we 
know it to be largely mechanical — a thing of much stud}' and 
experiment. A Hawthorne writes as he must. It was one of 
Emerson's theories that worthy matter may safely be left to 
find its own form. Hawthorne wrote greatl}' and nobly because 
he felt greatly and nobly. He invested art with an almost 
religious sanctity. He could stoop to no tricks; he could not 
even try to meet the taste of the public. He envied Longfel- 
low for his popularity-, but he felt that he must go his own 
way even though he hardly knew where food for his family was 
to come from. Fame or popularity did not enter into his 
calculations. He was one more artist who, after Emerson's 
ideal, "wrought in a sad sincerit}'. " 

HAERIET BE EC II EH ST OWE, 1S12-1896 

It would be in some degree an abuse of terms to include in 
a chapter on romance such distinctly moral and instructive 
tales as the once popular story of The Lamplighter (1853), by 



HARRIET BEECHER STOWE 147 

Maria S. Cummins, of Salem, or the juvenile Rollo and Lucy 
Books which from 1830 onward Jacob Abbott, a Maine clergy- 
man, used to turn out by the score. Nor is a history of litera- 
ture imperatively called upon to take account of such as these. 
But they are at least interesting as showing the purposeful 
nature of the New England temperament — so purposeful that 
even its popular fiction, no less than its creations of a finer 
art, moved along sober lines to didactic ends. It is precisely 
this nature that was brought to the creation of a book which 
not only far transcended these and all other American novels 
in popularity, but which rose almost to the level of great 
literature. That book, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cahin, 
and its author was Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

It is not to be understood that Mrs. Stowe wrote very con- 
sciously toward the end she served, but only that when she 
came to write she brought to the work all the moral conviction 
which arose from New England birth in a family of divines. 
As a matter of fact, her book was produced in a rather 
haphazard fashion. Her early married years were spent at Cin- 
cinnati, where she had some opportunities of becoming ac- 
quainted with Southern life, including the institution of slave- 
holding. It was later, in 1851, when she was living at Bruns- 
wick, Maine, where her husband was a professor in Bowdoin 
College, that she was asked by the editor of the Washington 
National Era to write for his paper a sketch of slave life. She 
wrote out and sent him the scene of ' ' The Death of Uncle Tom. " 
The attention which this sketch excited moved her to add other 
scenes, and in 1852 the entire novel, thus irregularly put to- 
gether, was published. The sales ran at once into the hundreds 
of thousands, and the influence which the book had in helping to 
crystallize the slowly gathering sentiment against slave-holding 
is quite incalculable. The characters of Uncle Tom, Topsy, 
little Eva, Miss Ophelia, St. Clair, Marks, Legree, fixed them- 
selves at once in the popular fancy as so many real persons. 

Indeed, the book was in intent more a novel than a ro- 



148 ROMANCE 

mance, for Mrs. Stowe aimed to set forth life as it really was. 
Readers of course made the mistake of assuming that all slavery 
was as bad as the one picture of it which she drew, and so she 
was often charged with exaggeration. But that she meant to be 
just, and that she was aiming, not at a section of people, but at 
a national crime, is shown by the fact that some of the best 
characters in the book are Southerners, while the brutal slave- 
driver is of the North. The story is deficient in many points 
of art, but it has the art of life — real people and real passions, 
humor, pathos, dramatic situation and action — and this, even 
apart from its political and social interest, would doubtless have 
carried it well into favor. 

Yet the strength of the book on this point is scarcely suffi- 
cient to insure its future vitality. If the extent of a writer's 
audience and the measure of his immediate influence 
were the final tests, and not artistic excellence and the 
measure of his insight into the eternal verities of the human 
spirit, Mrs. Stowe w^ould deserve to stand with the major 
novelists of her time. But the book to which her fame is in- 
separably bound grew out of a single social movement, and it 
will surely suffer the final eclipse that overtakes all such 
productions. The movement, as it chanced in this case, was 
of extraordinary significance, and the fate of the book is there- 
fore indefinitely postponed, but already it has long been more 
like a historical document than a living force. 

Mrs. Stowe continued to exercise her gift for drawing 
character, and some of her later stories — such sketches of 
New England village life, for instance, as The Minister s 
Wooing (1859) and Oldtown Folks (1869)— would in them- 
selves give her a respectable place among writers of fiction. 
But these books are in no sense romances. With Mrs. Stowe's 
later work, indeed, those phases of romantic activity which it 
has been the purpose of the present chapter to set forth, are 
practically lost sight of, and the realistic novel of the post-bellum 
period begins to appear. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE TEANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT. EMERSON, THOREAU 

There has been in American literature but one instance of 
anything like a conscious and organized intellectual ' 'move- 
ment. " The groups of writers we have thus far considered are 
groups made by the historian of literature who, looking back 
over the field, tries to bring men and events into some 
definite relations. Writers have been discussed together, not 
because they consciously worked together, but because they 
were contemporaries or because they chanced to possess similar 
traits. But about a decade before the middle of the nineteenth 
century a few men and women in New England, holding cer- 
tain views of life and morals, made a deliberate attempt to 
unite for the defence and spread of their views ; and though 
they never effected any organization that could be called a 
church, nor even established a permanent school of philos- 
oph}^ they did make a strong impression upon the intellectual 
life of their time, and their theories had issue in a small but 
very vital body of literature. The history, therefore, of Tran- 
scendentalism — a ponderous but not unfitting name which these 
thinkers themselves imported from abroad and which, though 
it was often employed by others in ridicule, they always 
treated gravely — belongs peculiarly to the history of American 
literature. 

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN NEW ENGLAND 

In the theology of New England, Calvinism had for two 
centuries held its own almost unchallenged. But the spirit of 
revolution and free thought that, about 1800, was working 

149 



150 THE TRAXSCEXDEXTAL MOVEMENT 

such changes in Europe, made itself felt also in America, and 
the sterner features of the religion of the Puritans had to give 
way before it. Mam' found it no longer possible to subscribe 
to the old doctiines, which taught, among other things, that 
human nature is totally depraved and that only certain '''elect" 
are marked for salvation. They began to declare more liberal 
views, and their declarations rapidly crystallized into what is 
now familiarly known as Unitarianism. This was a form of 
faith which practicalh' ignored all revelation outside of con- 
science, holding that man must look for guidance solely to the 
moral nature within, belie\iug it to be good, and so between 
himself and the one God work out his salvation. 

The new theology spread, if not far, at least so 
effectually that it was soon established at the DiAinity School 
at Harvard and in many of the prominent churches in and 
about Boston. Its growth and influence were largely due to 
that great vindicator of personal character as against pro- 
fessed creed, Dr. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), who 
was regarded thi'ough the thirty-odd years of his ministry at 
Boston as the most eloquent pulpit orator in America, and 
whose works are still held in high respect. Other prominent 
advocates were Theodore Parker (1810-1860), who gave to the 
cause his youthful zeal, and James Freeman Clarke (1810- 
1888), one of the foremost of the later Unitarians, both in the 
pulpit and in letters. 

Of course, the old church was not overthrown. Congrega- 
tionalism, though of a liberalized tj'pe, still prevailed in many 
parts of New England as it did elsewhere. And in Horace 
Bushnell (1802-1876), who preached at Hartford, and Henry 
Ward Beecher (1813-1887), who preached at Brooklyn, Con- 
gregationalism had, thi'ough the middle of the centmy, expon- 
ents nearly or quite as distinguished as Channing. But though 
these two published as well as preached— Beecher even wrote 



RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IX NEW ENGLAND 151 

a novc4 — the}' scarcel}^ concern us here. Neither Congrega- 
tionalism nor Unitarian ism, as such, produced an3'thing in the 
nature of enduring literature, and their progress has been 
glanced at here only because it will assist to an understanding 
of the half-religious and half-philosophical Transcendental 
movement, which, as was said, does touch literature closely 
enough to demand our attention. 

Into the precise origin of this movement we need not inquire. 
Doubtless the underlying philosophical ideas are older than 
Plato or Buddha, and were transmitted from the far East. The 
immediate impulse came from the philosophers of Germany, 
through many agents, conspicuously the English Coleridge and 
Carlyle. Beginning as a speculative philosophy only, it struck 
in New England upon very ardent moralists and very practical- 
minded men, among whom had already been sown the seeds of 
liberalism, and who, dissatisfied with their old forms and 
creeds, caught up this attractive philosophy and proceeded at 
once to erect it into a kind of gospel and guide of life. At the 
base of it lay what is called idealism — the reliance, as the 
word implies, upon ideas, or the world within, as the only sure 
testimony we can have of matter, or the world without. Tran- 
scendentalism (as understood in New England — not the Tran- 
scendentalism of the German Kant) meant the belief that 
within the mind are certain intuitions, or knowledge of truth 
and right, that transcend, that is to say, go beyond, are inde- 
pendent of, all experience. Whence these intuitions come we do 
not know; nor can we logically prove their validity — "truths 
which pertain to the soul cannot be proved by any external 
testimony whatsoever." We can only follow, with implicit 
trust, the "inner light." This, of course, is sheer individual- 
ism, the doctrine of the Unitarians pushed to its extreme, mak- 
ing every man his own moral guide and sweeping away at a 
blow all theological systems. It is therefore no matter for sur- 



152 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

prise that many men, like Emerson and Theodore Parker, were 
carried completely outside of the Unitarian church. 

The movement, however, was not of a nature to attract the 
masses. It differed from "The Great Awakening," that re- 
ligious revival of a century earlier,* in being less sudden, 
less violent, and in every way more restricted. It dif- 
fered radically, too, from the temperance and abolition 
movements of its own time, both of which owed much to 
it, in that these, being more definite "causes," could be fought 
out on the platform or by the people at the • polls. Tran- 
scendentalism was a cult of the cultured, and the other 
classes scarcely knew of its existence. Yet, though stripped 
of emotional and popular elements, it was none the less a wave 
of sentiment and reform — a genuine quickening of spiritual 
life. It had a large element of religion in it. Nothing could 
lightly shake the moral earnestness of the New Englanders, 
deepened as it was by more than two centuries of persecutions, 
hardships, and wars. The Unitarianism that came to divide 
the old church was altogether reverent and serious. And 
when new doctrines came to burst even the wide bonds of Uni- 
tarianism, there was still never any thought of giving up the 
fundamental principles of morality and religion. Men 
concerned themselves no longer about special schemes of 
salvation. But they were all the more deeply concerned 
about right living and thinking; and the common definition of 
Transcendentalism as a doctrine of "plain living and high 
thinking," loose as it is, is by no means bad. 

Some definite facts may serve to set the movement in a 
clearer light. 

Some time in 1836 a little knot of men and women began 
to meet in Boston, drawn together by a common interest 

* See page 30. 



RELIGION AND nilLOSOrilY IN NEW ENGLAND 153 

in matters that affected religion, and especially the condition 
of the Unitarian Church. This knot, though never definitely 
organized, came to be known in time as the Transcendental 
Club. Among those who took part in its meetings were 
Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, the Ripleys, the Channings, Theo- 
dore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, George Bancroft, Haw- 
thorne, Cranch, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Miss Elizabeth 
and Miss Sophia Peal)ody. In 1840 The Dial ^ a quarterly mag- 
azine, was established as the organ of the movement. For the 
first number Emerson wrote the introductory words, remarking 
upon what he called ' ' the progress of a revolution " in the society 
of New England, and dedicating the magazine to all who were 
"united in a common love of truth and love of its work," who 
had "given in their several adherence to a new hope," and 
who had ' ' signified a greater trust in the nature and resources 
of man than the laws or the popular opinions would well allow. " 
The editorship was held by Margaret Fuller for two years and 
then passed to Emerson for two years more, when the paper 
died for lack of support. The numbers were freely given 
away or destroyed, so that to-day a complete file is exceedingly 
difficult to obtain. It contained much literature of high qual- 
ity, notably Emerson's contributions, and also a great deal of 
mystical jargon. 

Of the more practical outcomes of this new- world attempt to 
bring philosophy down from the heavens to the earth, the most 
famous was the Brook Farm experiment. In 1 840 George Ripley, 
later known as a literary editor and critic, resigned from the min- 
istry and purchased a farm at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, 
persuading a number of others to co-operate with him in estab- 
lishing there an agricultural association. Their object was to 
see whether the brain and the hand could not be made to work 
advantageously together; whether the same individual might 
not be both thinker and worker, and thus find for himself a 



154 THE TRAXSCEXDENTAL MOVEMEXT 

simpler, freer, and happier life. They proposed also to conduct 
for the younger memlKn's a school in accordance with these 
Arcadian principles. The Transcendental Club had no direct 
part in Brook Farm ; most of the members of the club, indeed, 
■were rather opposed to it. But Bipley and his dozen or more 
associates (Hawthorne, we have seen, was one, and Charles A. 
Dana, late of the A'e^c Yorh Sun. another) moved to the farm in 
the spring of 1841 and set to work in high spirits. For sev- 
eral years the enterprise was conducted with some measure of suc- 
cess. Alcott, Emerson, ^larsaret Fuller, W. H. Channinor. 
Cranch, Horace Greeley, were all occasional visitors, interested 
and sometimes sympathetic ; Higginson and Lowell also passed 
that way; George William Curtis was there as a student. But 
the experiment changed form, and ended, after a few more 
years, in failure. 

Doubtless there were at this period, when reform was ' • in 
the air,'' many reformers who expected too much of human 
nature. They fancied that wonderful revolutions could be 
brought about in a day. as if a man could, by taking thought, 
add a cubit to his stature. And many of the methods pro- 
posed were extravagant in the extreme. Manual labor was all 
very well ; even a vegetarian diet might be tolerated ; but 
wherein lay the peculiar virtue of white garments, which Alcott 
insisted upon wearing ? ' • Some, " says Lowell, in his essay on 
Thoreau. • -had assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks 
and eyes should be substituted for buttons."' But in spite of 
mistakes and extravagances, and a host of beliefs and incidents 
that the pen of a Lowell could readily turn to ridicule, there was 
in Transcendentalism so much faith and nobility and unselfish en- 
deavor, and Xew England life was so much a gainer from it, that 
it is impossible to regard it uncharitably. 

The reformers spent their energies in various ways, as 
Parker in the pulpit, Eipley on the farm, Greeley and Dana 



EMERSON 155 

through the press ; but for the most part their individual influ- 
ences have long since been lost in the great current of human 
endeavor. A few worked in letters to scarcely more enduring 
fame. There was Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the re- 
puted head of the movement, the originality of whose methods 
of teaching; earned for him the title of ' ' the American Pesta- 
lozzi," and who contributed to The Dial "Orphic Sajings" of 
oracular sound and unfathomable meaning. There was the ill- 
fated Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810-1850), friend of Emerson 
and editor of The Dial, perhaps the one American woman of 
her day fitted by intellect and training to associate with the 
men of her set upon equal terms, but who lost her life in a ship- 
wreck just when her powers, chiefly critical, were fully ripened. 
There were poets, too — William Ellery Channing, the younger 
(1818- ), of Concord, the friend and elegiast of Thoreau, 
and Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892), a landscape painter 
of Cambridge, translator of Vergil's Aeneid (1872), and author 
of the familiar lines : — 

" Thought is deeper than all speech, 
Feeling deeper than all thought." 

Both of these were contributors to Tlie Dial. Another poet, 
somewhat further removed from the Concord circle, was Jones 
Very, of Salem (1813-1880), a strange religious recluse and 
mj^stic, who wrote many poems and sonnets of a merit quite 
out of proportion to their slender fame. But these names all 
pale before the name of him in whom for us Transcendental- 
ism virtually has its beginning and end, and mainly because 
of whom this history has been revived. 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882 

Hawthorne inscribed on the walls of his tower-study at the 
Wayside, "There is no joy but calm," and the motto would 
have suited well most of that coterie of men whose dreams were 



156 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

nurtured by the quiet Concord — the old Glrass-ground or Mead- 
ow River — and in the Massachusetts town whose name means 
peace. It would have suited none better than Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, who, placid in temperament even beyond the others, 
lived alwaj^s the simple life of the philosopher that he was. 
He was born at Boston, May 25, 1803. The blood of seven 
generations of clergymen ran in his veins. One of those 
clergymen, Peter Bulkeley, founded and named the town of 
Concord; another, ^Yilliam Emerson, was the builder of the 
Old Manse, and a patriot of the Revolution who preached to 
the minute-men. All were in their way heroic men. One 
prayed every night that no descendant of his might ever be 
rich; one gave away his wife's only pair of shoes to a woman 
who appeared at the door barefoot on a frosty morning. 

Ralph Waldo himself was reared hardil3\ His father 
died when he was but eight years old, and his mother was forced 
to take in boarders. An aunt was once overheard 
YoutJi. consoling the children for want of food with "stories 

of heroic endurance." He and his brother had but 
one overcoat between them, and — hard lot for a New England 
boy — he never had a sled. Later in life he wrote glowingly of 
' 'the Angels of Toil and Want, ' ' and extolled ' 'the iron band of 
poverty, the hoop that holds men staunch. ' ' At school he 
was quiet and studious, taking little interest in sports and mak- 
ing but moderate progress in his studies. It has been said of 
him that ' 'he never had an}^ talent for anything — nothing but 
pure genius;" and the genius was certainly slow to manifest 
itself. The hopes of the family centred in a younger and more 
brilliant brother, whose mind and body, however, broke early 
under their severer strain. 

He entered Harvard, mostly working his way, and taking 
his degree in 1821. For the next few years he taught, rather 
indifferently. One of his pupils was young Dana, and Emerson 



EMERSON 157 

wi'ote afterwards of Two Years Before the Mast: "Have you 
seen young Dana's book? Good as Robinson Crusoe, and all 
true. He was my scholar once, but he never learned 
At School. this of me, more's the pity." At this stage Emer- 
son was ambitious to become a pulpit orator, but he 
was growing more and more dissatisfied with himself, feeling that 
his abilities were in no direction adequate to his ambitions. 
The reasoning faculty seemed to be denied him, and its place 
was but ill supplied by imagination and a keen relish for poetry. 
He called himself an intellectual saunterer, ' 'sinfully strolling 
from book to book, from care to idleness." Fortunately, he 
was a stroller, too, in another sense ; he more than once declared 
that nothing jielded him so much pleasure as to steal away over 
the meadows and through the bushes, "picking blueberries and 
other trash of the woods, far from fame behind the birch 
trees." And he adds — a strange commentary upon the atti- 
tude of his fellows toward nature — : "I do not think I know a 
creature w^ho has the same humor, or would think it respect- 
able." He had to "slink" away. One of his earliest poems, 
the familiar "Grood-bye, proud world! I'm going home," 
was written at the time when, toward the end of his school- 
teaching, he went with his mother to her new home in the 
wooded seclusion of Canterbury Lane, where for a time he 
sought to put himself "on a footing of old acquaintance 
with Nature, as a poet should." 

The teaching paved the way to a course in Divinity, which 

followed. After several interruptions caused by a weak chest, 

which drove him once to South Carolina and Florida, 

Tt), the 

Church. Emerson was licensed to preach, and in 1829 was or- 

dained minister of the Second Church of Boston, the 
old North Church of Cotton Mather. In the same year he married, 
but his wife died within eighteen months. His relations with 
the people of his church were most cordial and his future 



158 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

looked brigM, if not exactly brilliant. But certain conscientious 
scruples, which had all along troubled him, would not let him 
rest. Even the slight formalism of his church, already liberalized 
beyond Cotton Mather's most uneasy dreams, he found too 
great. Forms seemed to stand between him and pure religion. 
To administer the Lord's Supper while regarding it as an ob- 
solete rite, perhaps worse than useless, seemed, to one of his 
sincere mind, a kind of sacrilege. In 1832 he withdrew from 
the church. His friends feared that he was mentally deranged. 
He was following an inner light that had not yet shone clearly 
enough for them to see. Meanwhile, he went to Europe, not 
for art or scenery, but to meet men,— Coleridge, Landor, 
Wordsworth, above all Carlyle, another man maturing slowly 
and still misunderstood and almost unknown. He spent an even- 
ing of quiet thought with Carlyle at his lonely Craigenput- 
tock home, and the next morning Carlyle watched him mount 
the hill and "vanish like an angel." Two obscure men of 
genius had met and recognized each other. Several years later 
Emerson introduced Carlyle's gresit sc^re-hook, Sartor Resartus, 
to American readers while English readers were still looking 
askance. The two never afterward lost touch, and their life- 
long correspondence makes a book of rare interest. 

The year 1835 found Emerson living with his mother in the 
Old Manse at Concord, meditating and writing, rather aimlessly, 
as Hawthorne was doing at Salem. He soon mar- 
At concord, ried again, and buying a house of his own, settled 
in Concord for the rest of his life. At the second 
centennial anniversary of the town, in 1835, he delivered an 
address, and on the anniversary of the battle of Lexington, 
April 19, 1836, at the completion of the Battle Monument, was 
sung his now famous hymn: — 

*' By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, 



EMERSON 159 

Here once the embattled farmers stood 
And fired the shot heard round the world." 

His mornings were spent in the study, his afternoons in walk- 
ing or gardening. He did some lecturing at Boston and else- 
where. For the rest, his half idj'llic life suited him, and he 
indulged his rural fancy by buying several tracts of woodland 
on the shores of Walden Pond. 

In the yesiV and the month in which the Transcendental 
Club came into being, September, 1836, Emerson published his 
first book, the slow growth of three years or more. Nature^ 
he entitled it, showing already his liking for brief titles, which 
allow the widest latitude of treatment. It was but a small 
book, as space-measurements go — eight short chapters, that 
would have made one good lecture in all. But almost every 
sentence had the weight of a lecture. ' ' Nature always wears 
the colors of the spirit." "The eye is the best of artists. " 
"Beauty is the mark Grod sets upon virtue." " Every natural 
action is graceful." "A work of art is an abstract or epitome 
of the world." "All things are moral." "A man is a god in 
ruins." " It is a sufficient account of that appearance we call 
the world that G-od will [/. e. , wills to] teach a human mind, 
and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent 
sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, 
house and trade." "Build, therefore, your own world." 
It is readily seen that this was a declaration of the idealistic 
philosophy, or rather faith. External nature is conceived of 
as none other than Grod apparent, Grod making himself mani- 
fest. There is little philosophical reasoning, but mainly broad, 
frank, confident statement. Whoever shall try to analyze the 
book for logical coherence of thought will be sadly puzzled. 
" I cannot argue," Emerson would say, " I only know." He 
distrusted reasoning, and lived and thought by his creed, < ^E.' - 
vereyour intuitions." And this, as we have seen, is the sub- 



160 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

stance of Transcendentalism. Nature, which joined to its 
mysticism genuine insight, was the foremost document of the 
new movement, and though the little tract did -not circulate 
widely, it went deep. Those who could not sympathize with 
its philosophy could at least feel its poetic beauty : — 

" I see the spectacle of morning from ths hilltop over against my 
house from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might 
share. The long, slender bars of cloud float lik3 fishes in the sea of 
crimson ligh^. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into the silent 
sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations ; the active en- 
chantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the 
morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap 
elements ! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of 
emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moon- 
rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall 
be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall 
be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams." 

The next year, 1837, Emerson delivered before the Phi 
Beta Kappa Society, at .Cambridge, his address on The 
American Scholar — "an event, "Lowell declared, in his essay on 
Thoreau, ' ' without any former parallel in our 
literary annals." To this high praise of Lowell's 
may be added the testimony of Holmes, who called the address 
"our intellectual Declaration of Independence." Certainly, 
one who would know Emerson at his best can do no better 
than turn to this second great confession of his faith and read 
it through. Even extracts show its dominant note to be 
inspiring individuality: — 

" Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning 
of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are 
rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains offoreign 
harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing 
themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new 
age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our 
zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a 
thousand years ? . . . 



EMERSOX 161 

"The old fable concerns a doctrine ever new and sublime ; that 
there is One Man, present to all particular men only partially, or through 
one faculty ; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole 
man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is 
all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and 
soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled 
out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint 
work, whilst each other performs his. ... In this distribution 
of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state 
he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of 
society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot 
of other men's thinking. . . . 

"Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the 
worst. What is the right use ? What is the one end which all means 
go to effect ? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never 
see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own 
orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the 
world, of value, is the active soul. . . . In its essence it is pro- 
gressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of 
any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, 
say they, — let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look back- 
ward and not forward. But genius looks forward : the eyes of man 
are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead : man hopes: genius 
creates. . . . Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instru- 
ments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read 
God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's 
transcripts of their readings. . . 

"In self-trust all tha virtues are comprehended. Free should the 
scholar be, — free and brave. . . . The man has never lived that 
can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person 
who shall set a barrier on any side to this unbounded, unboundable 
empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of 
^tna, lightens the Capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesu- 
vius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light 
which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates 
all men." 

An address, delivered the next year before the Divinity class 
at Cambridge, helped to fix the impression that a new leader had 
arisen, though even then few realized what a revolution he was 



162 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

leading. Emerson's manner was so quiet, his ideals were so lofty, 
and his faith was so serene, that he won his way almost unop- 
posed. Holmes said that he was "an iconoclast without a 
hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so ten- 
derly that it seemed like an act of worship." His first volume 
of Essays was published in 1841; and to-day there are few 
readers who do not know something of "History," "Self- 
Reliance," "Compensation," "Heroism, "or "The Over-Soul. " 
The second series, of a more practical, less seer-like nature — 
"Character," "Manners," "G-ifts," " Politics, "—followed 
in 1844. This was the period of his editorship of The Dial. 
Then came Poems, m 1847 ; Representative iJ/e?? (lectures delivered 
in 1845, a kind of complement to Carlyle's Heroes), in 1850; 
English Traits, 1856; The Conduct of Life, ISQO; May- Day and 
Other Pieces (poems), 1867; Society and SoIitude,lS7Q. Mean- 
while, he carried on his lecturing in the East, went to Eng- 
land and lectured in 1847, and between 18q0 and 1870, dur- 
ing the flourishing period of the "Lyceum" or Lecture Bureau 
system, made regular winter tours as far west as the Mississippi. 
Indeed, his early Boston lectures marked almost the beginning 
of that system which grew in this country to such great pro- 
portions, carrying into nearly every tillage of the North the best 
products of the country's culture through speakers of such emi- 
nent worth as Emerson, Everett, Phillips, Gough, Beecher. 
Holmes, Agassiz, Taylor, and Curtis. 

By 1870 Emerson's work was nearly done. He was accepted 

everywhere as one of those rare and essentially great men who, 

by simply being themselves and uttering what they 

^^^' feel, show what a gulf of superiority is fixed 

between them and all who strive and climb. He was some- 
thing more than lecturer, or essayist, or poet; he was the 
" Sage of Concord, " whom all delighted to honor. When his 
house burned, in 1872, his friends sent him off to Europe 



EMERSON 163 

and Egypt and rebuilt the house. People would still 
insist upon hearing him speak, though he but repeated old 
speeches. His mind was clear, but his memory and vitality 
were both failing. "My memory hides itself," he would say. 
He read as late as 1881 .before the Concord School of Philos- 
ophy. He attended Longfellow's funeral in February, 1882, 
but, it is said, could not recall Longfellow's name. His own 
death came a month later; and he w^as buried near Haw- 
thorne and Thoreau in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, on the 
pine ridge where a piece of unhewn granite marks his grave. 
It has been said that Emerson spent his life in teaching 
one thing — a statement, indeed, that will hold of most great 
teachers, but of none more literally. In Emerson's 
doctrine of the transcendent value of the inner rev- 
elation is to be found the key to his life and thought. It 
explains, for example, his attitude toward science and 
nature. Nature without is as nature within, and, in his 
conception, is but an infinite variation of the lesson of beauty 
and order that the Great Spirit will have us learn. He cared 
nothing for details. Details, he said, are melancholy. The 
large significance is the main thing. And the smallest life 
includes all : understand one, you understand all. ' 'Who telleth 
one of my meanings, " says the Sphinx, "is master of all I 
am," Thus all things in life are unified, and everything, down 
to the humblest organism and the humblest occupation, is 
glorified. Hence, too, the doctrine of self-reliance, which is 
only intuitionalism and individualism in other words. This 
doctrine he carried so far that he distrusted all concerted ef- 
forts for the betterment of societ3^ He rejected Ripley's 
invitation to join in the Brook Farm experiment. "At 
the name of a society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise 
and sharpen." What was the need of men standing together 
when they could stand alone? He was stirring up a nation's 



164 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

moral heroism by giving to each man the courage of his 
opinion. 

AYe talk of disciples of this man or that, but ' 'a disciple of 
Emerson" would be a contradiction of terms. For Emerson's 
very teaching frees the pupil from allegiance. He never said, 
"Follow me," but, in effect, "Follow the divinity within your- 
self, rely on your part in the Over-Soul. Never mind dogmas or 
other men's opinions ; never mind appearances ; never mind the 
conclusions of logic; — simpl}^ do what you feel to be right. If 
you will accept the place that Providence has given you, living 
your own life without env}' or self-effacing imitation, all w411 
be well." A noble philosophy indeed for the inherently noble, 
though one is often made to feel that its serene assurance 
does not take a sufficient account of sin and the weakness of 
unaided human nature. 

The style in which Emerson wrote was of a piece with his sub- 
stance. It is best described as oracular. Its want of sequence, 
which puts it in strong contrast, for example, to a 
style like De Quincey's or Newman's, arises natur- 
ally, since Emerson did not arrive at truth by subtle reasoning 
but simply gave forth the ideas as they came to him, in the 
tersest form. It is almost literally true that some of his essays 
can be read backward as well as forward. The relation between 
two sentences may sometimes be discovered by supplying the 
right connective, but more often there is no close relation. If 
a paragraph or sentence should fall out of one of his books, no 
one could tell where to replace it. He was in the habit of se- 
lecting a subject for a lecture and then throwing together from 
his note books all the scraps he could find that bore on the 
subject. Thus the relation of parts is not like that of the 
links of a chain, but more like that of the spokes of a wheel, 
which radiate from a central hub. Yet through all there is 
such a singleness of manner and personality that we are scarce- 



EMERSON 165 

ly aware, as in so many writers of detached thoughts, of any 
lack of constructiveness. The sentences are short and well 
turned, the words direct, strong, and often homely, the figures 
original and quaint, with a play of humor always just beneath 
the surface. He is the most quotable writer since Bacon. 
His epigrams are a constant stimulus, his aphorisms a constant 
satisfaction. He takes particular delight in the paradoxical, 
often finding the greater truth in inversion. ' 'Books are for the 
scholar's idle times." "The highest price you can pay for a 
thing is to ask it." "The borrower runs in his own debt." 
"Our strength grows out of our weakness." "We are wiser 
than we know." This is Poor Richard spiritualized at last. 

We have said too little of Emerson's poetry. In essence a 
poet, and in methods a seer, he should have spoken 
in the language of seers. And at times he did so 
speak, with rare effect. He was happier than Carlyle in hav- 
ing some gift of song. But the gift was partial only. He had 
a good ear for melody but not for the higher harmonies of 
verse. In his poetry lame lines and imperfect rhymes are 
frequent. Perhaps he followed too implicitly his own theory 
that truth, uttered under conviction, would find its own per- 
fect form. He fell most naturally into the simplest of metres, 
the four-foot couplet, and some of his best thoughts found 
their final expression in this form. 

There are two notable qualities in Emerson's poetry, — the 
half-mystical philosophy of which he oftentimes made it the 
voice, and the love of nature which we have seen to be so inti- 
mate a part of the man. Among the poems embodying the 
former quality, the best are The Sphinx, The Problem, Uriel, Al- 
phonso of Castile, Merlin, Saadi, Brahma. But philosophy rarely 
makes so good poetry as do simple perception of beauty and 
the emotions which beauty stirs. Emerson as a philosopher- 
poet must fall below Lucretius or even below old Omar Khay- 



166 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

3'am, but Emerson as a poet of nature has not many superiors. 
Take some of his most ragged lines — the song of the pine in 
Woodnotes: — 

"Heed the old oracles, 

Ponder my spells; 
Song wakes in my pinnacles 

When the wind swells. 
Soundeth the prophetic wind, 
The shadows shake on the rock behind. 
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings 
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings. 

Harken! Harken! 
If thou wouldst know the mystic song 
Chanted when the sphere was young." 

This is pure lyric rapture, uncontainable melody, bom of a 
heart that beats in tune with the heart of mother Earth. And 
there is much more as good, or better, in the jo3'ful prelud- 
ings of May-Day, or the proud boasts of Monadnoc, ' 'moun- 
tain strong" and '-grand affirmer of the present tense,'" scorner 
of the little men who daily climb his side, yet patient waiter 
for the poet who in large thoughts shall ' -string him like a 
bead." Read also Each and All, Ehodora, The Humhle-Bee, 
The Snow- Storm, Days, The Titmouse, Two Rivers. The poem 
of The Humhle-Bee seems almost to shine, so saturated is it 
with the heat and light of summer. But even in these poems 
the philosopher is rarely out of sight. Behind the phenomena 
of nature are always the deep meanings meant to be revealed, 
— "always," says Mr. Stedman, "the idea of Soul, central and 
pervading, of which Nature's forms are but the created sj'm- 
bols." 

There is one poem, the Threnody, that is almost too sacred 
to be handled critically, since grief has its own rhythm, and 
broken utterance obeys a higher law than art's. Emerson's 
boy Waldo, — 



J 



EMERSON 167 

''The hyacinthine boy, for whom 

Morn well might break and April bloom," — 

died at the age of five. That memory at least never left the 
man, who almost the last thing before he died, forty years 
afterward, said, "Oh, that beautiful boy!" The Threnody 
croons through the first stages of sorrow, the sense of mere 
loss and aching memories, — 

"The painted sled stands where it stood, 
The kennel by the corded wood ;' ' 

bursts suddenly into passionate protest against Nature ; grows 
calm again with consolation; and then rises to the highest note 
of all — the seer-like vision and the deep Heart's utterance: — 

''When frail Nature can no more, 

Then the Spirit strikes the hour: 

My servant Death, with solving rite, 

Pours finite into infinite. 

Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow, 

Whose streams through nature circling go? 

Nail the wild star to its track 

On the half-climbsd zodiac? 

Light is light which radiates. 

Blood is blood which circulates. 

Life is life which generates, 

And many seeming life is one,— 

Wilt thou transfix and make it none?" 

Then comes the confident close, voicing the verdict of the faith 
of centuries: — 

"What is excellent 
As God lives, is permanent; 
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; 
Heart's love will meet thee again." 

It is doubtful if there be a more exalted strain than this in 
American poetry. 

There have been several attempts of late to revalue Emer- 



168 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

son and his work, and the tendency is to abate much of the 

former high estimate. It is a critical tendency, very 
Security of i . i , , ^ 

his Fame. natural in a day when the philosophy of experience 

has the vogue. But Emerson's books continue to 
sell, and there is little reason to doubt that people are read- 
ing them with ever fresh delight and inspiration. By their 
unflinching optimism they keep a strong hold. Emerson was a 
sage, but a sage for youth. Youth is our perennial idealist, 
and young readers find in his work precisely the faith and 
cheer that keep courage and nobility alive in the world. Be- 
sides, even if the time should come when Emerson shall be no 
longer actually needed, it seems impossible that he should be 
forgotten. His service to his own day was too great. By his 
call to independence and intellectual honesty at a time when 
Americans were intellectually subservient, he set New England, 
and through New England, America, finally free. He went him- 
self straight to the fountain-heads of wisdom and inspiration 
— to Plato, Confucius, Christ; but even them he treated as 
brothers, not as masters. For he was no more to be intoxi- 
cated by the wine of other men's truth than he was to be caught 
by the glitter of falsehood and sham. Calm, sane, self-cen- 
tred, undistempered by enthusiasms, on the one hand bowing 
to no popular idol, on the other standing his ground with our 
common humanity when many apostles of the Transcendental 
faith were swept off their feet, he was just such a man as is 
needed in an age of shifting faith and widening knowledge, — a 
man to proclaim anew the sanctity of the individual conscience 
and to declare that things are not in the saddle, but that men 
are still masters of their fate. 

HENRY DAVID TUOREAU, 1817-1862 

To call Thoreau a Transcendentalist would be somewhat mis- 
leading. His place in this chapter is determined by the fact that 
his lot was cast among the Concord thinkers — he was the only 



THOREAU 100 

one of note born at Concord — who made the new philosophy 
such a potent factor in New England thought and life. He came 
to manhood precisely at the time when the doctrines were taking 
definite shape, and it was impossible that he should not come 
somewhat under their influence. His relations, too, with Emer- 
son were very close ; but he was severely independent, both as 
man and as thinker, and, apart from an occasional visit to the 
meetings of the Transcendental Club and a few contributions 
to The Vi'alj he was scarcely to be regarded as one of the cir- 
cle. He was, indeed, a philosopher after Emerson's own heart, 
living sturdily the doctrine that Emerson preached, and going 
steadily his self-appointed way. Often puzzling and sometimes 
repelling, yet always fresh and stimulating, he is one of the 
most interesting figures in our literary historj^ 

On his mother's side Thoreau was of old New England 
stock, and he is said to have drawn most of his traits from 

that side. His name shows his French extraction. 

His paternal grandfather came to America from 
the island of Jersey just before the Revolutionary War. His 
grandmother bore the good Scotch name of Burns. His father 
was a pencil-maker, a small, plain, deaf, unobtrusive man. 
Henry was born in 1817 (the year Emerson entered college) 
and he spent at Concord nearly all of the forty-five years of 
his life. As a boy he drove his mother's cow to pasture, as 
Emerson had done at Boston. He learned the family trade of 
pencil-making, but abandoned it when he became proficient, 
not desiring to do again what he had done once. We are re- 
minded of Carlyle's undertaking law because of the diflficulty 
of succeeding in it, and then abandoning it because it offered 
no reward but money. Later, however, Thoreau did sometimes 
help his father in his business, which grew to be mainly 
the preparation of plumbago for electrotyping. He was grad- 
uated from Harvard at the age of twenty, accomplished, as 



170 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

scholarship went, in rhetoric, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. 
After graduation he was school-teacher, lecturer, surveyor, pen- 
cilmaker, farmer, and recluse, by turns. His biography from 
twenty to twenty-four he condensed into the following notes: 
' ' Kept town school a fortnight ; began the big Red Journal, 
October, 1837 ; found my first arrow-head; wrote a lecture 
(my first) on ' Society,' March 14, 1S38, and read it before the 
Lyceum ; went to Maine for a school in May, 1838; commenced 
school in the Parkham house in the summer of that year ; wrote 
an essay on 'Sound and Silence,' December, 1838 ; fall of 1839, 
up the Merrimac to the White Mountains ; the Red Journal, of 
596 pages, ended June, 1840; Journal of 396 pages ended 
January 31, 1841." 

It was a life in which the picking up of an arrow-head or 
the discovery of a richer blueberry patch were events, and the 
election of a new President but an incident. He lived two or 
three years in the house of Emerson as mechanic, gardener, 
and companion of Emerson's children; spent six months at 
Staten Island as tutor to the children of Emerson's brother 
William; traversed the length of Cape Cod on foot; and made 
various expeditions to the Maine woods and Canada. His two 
years' retreat at Walden, through which he became famous, 
Avas only in keeping with the general tenor of his life. The 
man, whose first lecture was upon the subject of " Society," 
alwaj^s lived on the outskirts of society or avoided it alto- 
gether. Walden Pond is a small lake in the Walden woods, 
one mile south of Concord. There, in the spring of 1845, on 
a piece of Emerson's woodland, Thoreau built a hut, cutting 
the timbers for it with an ax which he borrowed from Mr. 
Alcott, and which he returned, he boasted, sharper than he 
received it. This cabin he made his home for the next two 
years. Brook Farm was a social experiment; Thoreau's might 
be called an unsocial one. He was not, however, turning his 



THOREAU 171 

back on family and friends, whom he often visited, but only 
gratifying his love of wild ways, and putting into practice 
some of his ideas about economy and simplicity of living. He 
says himself : "I went to the woods because I wished to live 
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if 
I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to 
die, discover that I had not lived. " He found in this seclusion 
full opportunity to do the two things he cared most about — 
observe and enjoy nature, and reflect upon the ways of men. 
The expenses of a year's living of this sort he could meet by 
working about six weeks. The rest of the time was free for 
rambling, studying, and writing. Thus was written most of 
his book, WaJden, which, however, he did not succeed in getting 
published until 1854. Before that he published A Week on the 
Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849), the outcome of an expe- 
dition made with his elder brother shortly after he left college. 
The larger part of the edition — some seven hundred copies — 
he had to store in his garret. These two were the only books 
published during his lifetime. He returned to civilization 
after his two years' experiment, but continued his explorations 
a-field, and died in 1862, in some measure the victim of the 
hardships which his gypsy instincts were constantly leading him 
to suffer. He died bravely, declaring, as he had declared when 
he faced life at twenty-four, that he ' ' loved his fate to the 
very core and rind." His too early loss was fittingly mourned 
in more than one tender lament by his friend, Ellery Channing, 
like himself a passionate nature- lover : — 

" The swallow is flying over, 
But he will not come to me ; 
He flits, my daring rover, 

From land to land, from sea to sea ; 
Where hot Bermuda's reef 
Its barrier lifts to fortify the shore, 
Above the surf's wild roar 



172 THE TRAXSCEXDEXTAL INIOVEMEXT 

He darts as swiftly o'er,— 

But he who heard his cry of spring 

Hears that no more, heeds not his wing." 

Thoreau is scarcely to be estimated as other men, from 
whom he stands so far apart in almost all respects. He 
was a riddle even to those who knew him well. 
Hawthorne wrote in his journal: "Mr. Thoreau 
dined with us. He Is a singular character — a young man with 
much of wild, oris^inal nature still remainino- in him. He is 
as ugly as sin — long nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth 
and somewhat rustic, though courteous manners. But his 
ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes 
him much better than beauty." Mrs. Hawthorne, after hear- 
ing him lecture, wrote : ' >Mr. Thoreau has risen above all his 
arrogance of manner, and is as gentle, simple, ruddy, and 
meek as all geniuses should be; and now his great blue eyes 
fairly outshine and put into shade a nose which I once thought 
must make him uncomely forever." To Eose Hawthorne 
Lathrop he seemed "sad as a pine tree," though to the few 
friends to whom he warmed he was all sunshine, and he could 
both sing and dance, and would play with kittens by the half 
hour. His unbendino; nature brought him much criticism 
which a little compliance or a little explanation might have 
saved him. A schoolmate who knew him for a good whittler 
once asked him to make a bow and arrow, but he refused with- 
out giving the reason^ that he had no knife. On another 
occasion he was accused of stealing a knife. He could easily 
have proved his absence at the time, but he preferred merely to 
make denial, letting his companions suspect what they pleased. 
It is hard to tell whether he simply disliked ordinary social 
intercourse or whether he feared it. The woods meant to him 
freedom, and he was like the muskrat, which, he said, "will 
gnaw its third leg off to be free." He was constantly tempted 



THOREAU 173 

to climb over a back fence and go across lots rather than run 
the gantlet of the houses fronting each other on the street. 
Men of convi^ial natures, lil^e Lowell or Stevenson, are re- 
pelled by such an ascetic spirit, and are likely to prove unsym- 
pathetic critics. It requires the unruffled tolerance of an 
Emerson to see all of his good points and none of his bad ; 
and his habit of contradiction made even Emerson say, 
" Thoreau is, with difficulty, sweet." 

But Emerson and a few others, like Ellery Channing, 
learned to make the right allowances. Manj" of his declara- 
tions were only half-truth, and much of his profession was 
bravado. "Blessed are they," he would say, "who never read 
men's affairs, for they shall see nature, and, through her, Grod. " 
Yet he took a keen interest in society at large and even in pol- 
itics, and he could take an active part when he was sufficiently 
aroused. He w^ent to jail rather than pay his tax, when he 
felt that the tax was supporting a government that supported 
slavery. It was his way of protesting against a great wrong ; 
and when Emerson looked into his cell and said, "Henry, 
why are j^ou here?" his reply was, "Why are you not here ?" 
He met John Brown in 1857, and two years later, after the cap- 
ture of Brown and before his execution, he spoke out boldlj^ in his 
defence at Concord, Worcester, and Boston. It is unfortunate 
that Lowell should have found in such a man so much imita- 
tion, indolence, and selfishness, and so little else. 

Not many of us will care to accept the philosophy of 
Walden, so extreme is it, and, on the outside, so bitter, though 
with much sweetness at the core. Every 
thoughtful man must see much in our civilization 
to deplore, but if he be right-minded he will give helpful and not 
destructive criticism. We shall not remedy the faults by going- 
back to barbarism. It is easy to corner Thoreau in an argu- 
ment. He was always afraid he should die without having 



174 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

lived; and, according to his own definition, that a man is rich 
in proportion to the number of things he can get along with- 
out, he certain!}' lived like a baron. But his method of liAing 
deep and • -sucking out all the marrow of life " b}' going back 
to nature and the barest terms of existence, invoh'ed as much 
loss as gain. You can get along without a plow if you recog- 
nize no social obligations and have no wife or children to feed. 
You can get along without a hoe if you are willing to live on 
cow-parsnips. But it is the better teaching of ci^ilization to 
get along icitli as many things as possible. • -Why newspa- 
pers, and post-offices, and railroads?"' asks Thoreau. But 
why. then, even an ax. since the beavers used their teeth? 
The ax and the railroad alike represent expedition and expe- 
diency. There is a poetic view, too. Thoreau protested 
against so much hammering of stone, but Emerson celebrated 
the beauty of man's achievements as being one with the 
beauty of nature's : — 

" Earth proudly wears the Parthenon 
As the best gem upon her zone, 
And Morning opes with haste her lids 
To gaze upon the pyramids." 

But we soon learn that Thoreau is deliberately exaggerating, 
partly for the love of it, though mostly to drive home a truth. 
The thins; for us to do is to read him intelligentlv. with fair, 
open minds, not accepting everj'thing, but picking out the grains 
of truth, and taking innocent pleasure meanwhile in watching 
the chaff of wit and cynicism fly. There is a characteristic pas- 
sage in irr/Zc/f/?. for example, upon the -'sleepers"' that sup- 
port the rails in the bed of a railroad, each one of which. Thoreau 
says, is a man — an Irishman, or a Yankee man. He is thinking 
of the workmen whose lives have gone into such labor. ' ' And 
when they run over a man who is walking in his sleep, a super- 
numerar}' sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they 



THOREAU 175 

suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if 
this were an exception. " This is very clever, but very illogical. 
The laborer's life is not sacrificed to his labor. Action is 
the law of being, and a man lives the longer and the better for 
working. Yet the general meaning of the passage is clear, 
and also true, — that industrialism tends to kill the spirit. Much, 
indeed, lies in knowing how to read Thoreau. His philosophy 
is more of a curiosity than a creed to be adopted ; yet many of 
his ideas hold much truth, and only need sensible modification 
to be applied to life. 

Thus prepared, we can read safely and with amusement the 
sharpest passages of Walden : — 

"1 would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for cur- 
tains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I 
am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour milk 
nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade 
my carpet ; and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still 
better economy to retreat behind some curtain nature has provided 
than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. A lady 
once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, 
nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, prefer- 
ring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid 
the beginnings of evil. 

" Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, 
for his life had not been ineffectual : — 

'The evil that men do lives after them.' 
As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to 
accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tape- worm. 
And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust-holes, 
these things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying de- 
struction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The 
neighbors eagerly collected to view them, and carefully transported 
them to their garrets and dust-holes, to lie there until their estates are 
settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks 
the dust." 

What is all this but teaching in a quaint way what Lowell 



176 THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT 

taught in The Vision of Sir Launfal^ that ' 'bubbles we buj' 

with a whole souFs tasking" and forget that "heaven is given 

away"? Thoreau himself says: "Superfluous wealth can buy 

superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessar}- 

of the soul." And the whole gospel of Walden might almost be 

reduced to the formula, ' Simplify your life and elevate your 

thoughts ;' for everywhere, in one form or another, beneath 

all the eccentricity and exaggeration, that gospel can be read. 

The foregoing passage will serve also to illustrate Thor- 

eau's style. We scarcely think of him as a humorist, j^et there 

is nearly always some humor lurking behind his 
His style. .." "i.ii • i t r ' ■, 

cjmicism, scarcely the less enjoyaiDle lor the tinge 

of bitterness. His best aphorisms are likely to have a humor- 
ous twist: "Some circumstantial evidence is yery strong, as 
when you find a trout in milk." The force of the style is also 
noteworthy; the paragraphs aboye end with an almost startling 
abruptness. Indeed, few philosophers, if we may dignify Thor- 
eau with the term, have written more forcibly — with more terse- 
ness, directness, and concreteness of imagery. He was a past 
master in the art of putting things. Emerson praises him for a 
better rhetorician than himself : ' 'I find the same thoughts, the 
same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond and il- 
lustrates by excellent images that which I should have con- 
yeyed in a sleepy generalization." And so it is. "Trust 
thyself," says Emerson: "eyery heart vibrates to that iron 
string." Says Thoreau: "The head monkey at Paris puts on 
a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the 
same." Here is the same thought, the same lesson, only 
Thoreau, instead of encouraging us to independence, ridicules 
our conformity, and does it with a force and concreteness 
that go quite beyond Emerson's. But of course the quiet 
strength of Emerson is more effective in the end. 

The parts of Thoreau's work upon which his fame rests most 



THOREAU 177 

securely to-day are his nature studies. He may have boasted 
A ''Poet over-much of his love for nature and unduly taun- 

Naturaiistr' ted other men for their indifference, but his own 
steadfast and reverent love is beyond question. He was 
a veritable faun, sealed from birth of the most ancient order of 
Nature's woodmen. Cities he dreaded like a Bedouin's camel, 
and he was nowhere so happy in Boston as at the railway 
station waiting for the cars to take him away. ' 'There is in 
my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wild- 
ness. " He was prouder to have a sparrow alight on his 
shoulder than he would have been to wear an epaulet. He 
prized much less his accomplishments in G-reek and Latin than 
his ability to find his way through the woods in the darkest 
night, to take a fish from the water with his hand, to eat a 
wild crab- apple without making a wry face. Agassiz, for 
whom he made collections of fishes, praised his sagacity. His 
attitude toward nature, however, was the poet's rather than 
the naturalist^ s. He was lured by the charm of her variety 
and mystery, and cared more to feel than to know. And his 
wide reading of the best literature only, his command of lan- 
guage, and his imagination, gave him a power to interpret his 
feelings that is rare among men of his stamp. It is interest- 
ing to note how inevitably he passes from observation to sym- 
pathy: — 

"Shad are still taken in the basin of Concord River at Lowell, 
where they are said to be a montli earlier than the Merrimac shad, 
on account of the warmth of the water. Still patiently, almost pa- 
thetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, 
revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still 
met by the Corporation with its dam. Poor shad! where is thy re- 
dress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to 
bear thy fate? Still wandering the sea in thy scaly armour to in- 
quire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them 
free for thee to enter." 



ITS THE TRAXSCEXDEXTAL MOVEMENT 

Poetry reveals itself everywhere in his phrasing. The haze 
is '"the sun's dust of travel." The ice of the pond '-whoops'' 
on a winter's night. Toadstools are • -round- tables of the 
swamp gods.'' Some taller mast of pine rises in the midst of 
the woods '-like a pagoda." The crowing of the wild Indian 
pheasant would --put nations on the alert." Aloreover, there 
are records of sounds and visions that none but a poet could 
hear or see: — 

"The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep 
over the ridgea of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial 
parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, 
the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear 
it, Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere." 

'•'Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while 

I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its 
thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deep- 
er; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars." 

Sometimes he runs into rhyme and becomes a poet confessed ; 
and though his verse, as such, is very erratic, his delicate 
lines on Smoke. — 

''Light winged smoke, Icarian bird I 
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, 
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn," — 

are worth all the praise they have received. 

In the four years immediately following Thoreau's death 
five books were published from the mass of manuscript which 
he left — Excursions, The Maine ^Yoods, Cape Cod, Letters^ 
and A Yankee in Canada. To these of late years have been 
added five more — Spring, Summer, etc. They give him a 
very dignified place in the library and assure him of a perman- 
ence of which he little dreamed. In his own day. when the 
polished N. P. Willis of Xew York was a favorite among the 
younger writers, few knew his name and none would 



THOREAU 179 

have ventured to prophesy for him any place in American 
letters. But time has slowly reversed the verdict. Willis's 
little light is flickering, Thoreau's begins to burn with the 
steadiness of a fixed star. The day is past, too, for the crit- 
icism that he was only a reflection of Emerson. Each owed 
something to the other, and doubtless Thoreau's debt was the 
greater, for he was the younger man and his was the inferior 
mind. But the difference between them was greater than the 
likeness. Emerson's books belong on those shelves w^here we 
put the philosophical works of Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Mon- 
taigne, and Bacon. Thoreau's belong with that group of more 
modest classics of the forest and field that gather about 
White's Selhorne and Walton's Complete Angler, 



CHAPTP]R VII 

NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTUEE. — LONGFELLOW, WHITTIEE, 
LOWELL, HOLMES, WHITMAN 

Of the period of our literature now under consideration — 
the prolific middle of the nineteenth centur}' — four or five 
major writers and countless minor ones still remain to be 
treated. Placing them here in a single group is, perhaps, on 
the ground of coherence, a course not entirely justifiable. Yet 
to make an}' of the divisions that suggest themselves would 
seem to be even less justifiable. A separation, for instance, 
into poets and prose-writers is scarcely possible, since many of 
the writers were both; and to divide along other lines, as into 
Cambridge scholars, anti-slavery agitators, and the like, would 
again be only to work confusion by making divisions that 
seriously overlap. It seems better therefore to keep the writers 
together, regarding them broadly as contributors, each in his 
way, to our national life and character — as co-workers toward 
the one end of upbuilding a modern nation of political unit}' 
and of continuous moral and intellectual growth. It is true, 
the writers we have already treated might be regarded in the 
same light, but there is at least this difference, that they 
worked more specificallj' to literary or personal ends, while the 
men whom we have now to consider were in closer touch with 
our social organization, and their writings and speeches largely 
grew out of, or contributed toward, the wide activities among 
which they moved, 

ORATORY 

Orator}' in America, which has perhaps had a more contin- 
uous history than any other form of letters except theology, 

180 



ORATORY ' 181 

reached its highest development between 1830 and 1860. This 
is, of course, only another manifestation of the great intel- 
lectual and artistic energy that attended the development and 
fixing of our national character, the more direct stimulus in 
this case being found in the political conditions — in the diffi- 
cult adjustment of early national principles, and especially in 
the unsettled and continually vexing issue of slavery. But our 
oratory scarcely rose to the level attained in other literary forms. 
It was made illustrious by at least two eminently great men — 
Webster and Lincoln — but it never united in one man all the 
original genius and the eloquent and scholarly virtues that have 
made the speeches of Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet, and 
Burke, permanent classics in the world's literature. 

Daniel Webster we are still disposed to regard as our fore- 
most exponent of deliberative and forensic eloquence. He had, 
to begin with, physical advantages that seemed to 
Webster, proclaim him an even greater man than he was. 

1782-1802. Carlyle, a master at portraiture, saw him once and 
described him in a letter to Emerson : ' ' The tanned complex- 
ion; that amorphous, crag-like face; the dull black eyes under 
their precipice of eyebrow, like dull anthracite furnaces, need- 
ing only to be hJown\ the mastiff mouth, accurately closed. 

He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all 

the world, ' This is your Yankee Englishman, such limbs we 
make in Yankeeland. ' " Born on a backwoods farm in New 
Hampshire at the close of the Revolutionary War, and gradu- 
ated from Dartmouth in 1801, Webster rapidly rose in the legal 
profession, until he was sent to Congress in 1813. He shortly 
afterward took up his residence at Boston, and from that time on, 
as representative, senator, secretary of state, and Whig aspirant 
for the Presidency, he was, as Carlyle put it, ' ' the notablest of 
our notabilities. " His supremacy in American statesmanship 
was somewhat comparable to that, in later years, of Gladstone 
in English or of Bismarck in Prussian. 



182 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

"Webster's gi'eat service was done in the stormy Congressional 
debates of 1S30-1S32, when he came forward in opposition to 
the principle of state sovereignty, and helped to fix finally the 
supreme power and authority of the federal constitution. He 
made himself the champion of the national idea, of complete 
union, and it is fitting that he should be remembered by those 
famous words with which he closed the speech in reply tx) 
Hayne: • -Liberty a ?« J Union, now and forever, one and in- 
separable." The great blemish upon his career was his weak- 
ness in nut facing squarely the question of slave-holding when 
that issue was approaching a crisis. By supporting the com- 
promise measures of 1850 instead of throwing his influence with 
the radical opponents of slavery, he added to the confidence of 
the slave power and contributed much to the final disastrous re- 
sults. Whittier, in the poem Ichahod, lashed him severely for 
his defection. But Webster sulTered to the full for his weak- 
ness, and many years after his death Whittier was glad to do 
his memory justice, moiuTiing, in The Lost Occasion, that 
Webster had not been spared till the day of actual disunion, 
assured that no sti'onger voice than his would have th^n 

'-' Called out the utmost might of men, 
To make the Union's charter free 
And strengthen law by liberty." 

The best examples of Webster's forensic pleading are to be 
foimd in the aro'ument on the Dartmouth Collesje Case before 
the United States Supreme Court in ISIS and in his speech at 
the White murder trial at Salem in 1829. His great delib- 
erative speeches in the Senate have already been mentioned — 
the Eeply to Hayne in 1830, and the '-Seventh of March 
Speech" in favor of compromise in 1850. His best public ad- 
dresses include one delivered at the anniversary at Plymouth 
in 1820 J one at the laying of the corner-stone of the Bunker 
Hill Monument and another at its completion, and a eulogy on 



ORATORY 183 

Adams and Jefferson. His oratory was mainly of the old 
type, only some degrees removed from the half-pedantic clas- 
sicism that was the ideal of the early academic orators. Yet 
he was undeniably eloquent, both in the conventional and 
in the real sense of the word — clear in thought, strong and 
pure and sonorous in diction, with a beauty of imagery and an 
animation of style that have set his printed speeches among 
the select examples of modern oratorical prose. What those 
speeches must have been in utterance all the enthusiastic ac- 
counts of their hearers will not suffice for us to realize, since 
the force of the speaker's personality must have counted for 
even more than his words, lending impressiveness to his simplest 
and calmest statements, and enabling him, when deeply stirred, 
to carry everything before him. 

Henry Clay, who belonged to Virginia by birth and to Ken- 
tucky by residence, came into public life somewhat before Web- 
ster, and rose to be the recognized leader of the Whig 
1777-1852. ' pai'ty, and, with the exception of Webster, its f ore- 
j. c. Calhoun, most man. He was three times a candidate for the 

1782-1850 

Presidency, and once narrowly missed election. 
Though opposed to slavery, he was not radical in his views. 
As the chief promoter of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and 
the author of the compromise measures of 1850, he earned the 
title of "the great pacificator." As an orator he held and 
swayed audiences as effectually as ever Webster did, though 
more exclusively by his personalit}' and his rhetorical magic. 
He lacked the learning and depth of that great statesman, and 
his orations are now little read. From farther south, and with 
wholly southern views and doctrines, came John C. Calhoun, 
of South Carolina. It was he, then president of the Senate, 
whom Webster was really attacking in his famous Reply to 
Hayne in 1830, for Calhoun was an ardent believer in States' 
Rights and was the author of the doctrine of Nullification. He 



184 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

was scarcely eloquent, as we ordinarily understand the term, 
hut was a great thinker, and the clearness of his logic was con- 
spicuous in everything he said. This, coupled with his earn- 
estness and his candor, gave him a clear title to his fame. 

Massachusetts produced the men who pressed Webster most 
closely for oratorical honors of the academic kind — Kufus 
Choate, the lawyer, and Edward Everett, the 
i7'>9-/«59^^^^^' scholar, statesman, and diplomatist. Choate was 
Edward never brought into the same great conflicts as Web- 

1794-1865 ^^^^' ^^^ eloquence being expended before juries; 

but he had even more than Webster's scholarship 
and refinement, and, with a fervid imagination and an inex- 
haustible flow of words, he exercised over emotional hearers that 
"spell" which it was long thought to be an orator's highest 
virtue to exercise. His oratory held much of the poetic qual- 
ity, and is seen at its best in his eulogies — the eulogy, for ex- 
ample, on Webster. Everett, who began life as an editor and 
professor of G-reek, held many high positions : he was governor 
of Massachusetts, minister to G-reat Britain, president of Har- 
vard College, Secretary of State, and United States senator. 
His oratory also was of the finished and scholarly type. It 
might even be called cold, for Everett lacked the personal force 
which Choate and Webster possessed. Yet by frequent lec- 
tures on the platform he came into closer touch with the gen- 
eral public than most statesmen of his day. Emerson testified 
to his great influence on the youth of New England; and late 
in life he delivered his famous eulogy on Washington one hun- 
dred and fifty times in the interest of the Mount Vernon Asso- 
ciation. His last important oration was the one delivered at 
the dedication of the national cemetery at Grettysburg in 1863 
— an occasion made most memoral)le l)y another address, the 
unpretentiously noble speech of Abraham Lincoln. 

Lincoln, almost the antithesis of the academic orators, 






DANIEL WKBSXER 
EDWARD EVERETT 



WILLIAM hickli:ng PRESCOXT 

FRANCIS FARKMAN 



ORATORY 185 

was a potent influence upon what might be called the modern 

, , school — that school which discards pedantic phrases 

Abraham ^ ^ 

Lincoln, and classical allusions, rather avoids rhetorical 

1809-1865. climaxes and other eflfects, and depends upon a less 
impassioned, more conversational manner. Lincoln's training 
was obtained in actual law-practice, where he had to confront 
and handle real issues before audiences immediately concerned. 
His audiences, too, were of the primitive "West, more keen than 
cultured. He practiced at the Illinois bar as early as 1837; 
and in 1848, when a candidate for the United States senator- 
ship from Illinois, he held in that state the series of joint 
discussions with Stephen A. Douglas, largely on the slavery 
question, which made him famous. The schooling was pre- 
cisely suited to the man, and it was a wholly natural result 
that the more momentous addresses which he was called upon 
later to deliver — his two inaugural addresses, for instance, or 
the G-ettysburg address — should be models of simplicity, sin- 
cerity, directness, and force. AYhatever virtues lie in the 
Saxon character and may be expressed in the Saxon tongue, 
these are summed up in the unadorned eloquence of xAbraham 
Lincoln. 

The anti-slavery movement brought forth speakers of many 

kinds in many places, but apart from Lincoln and Grarrison 

(who was more of a iournalist than a speaker), the 

Charles Sum- . '' . ^ . ^ -, . , , -i . 

ner, 1811-1S74. niost conspicuous orators identified with the direct 
Wendell Phil- issue of abolition were Charles Sumner and Wendell 
Phillips, both of Boston, and both again orators of 
the scholarly type. Sumner's w^ork was done chiefly in Con- 
gress, where he was recognized for years as the great anti- 
slaveiy leader. Indeed, the history of Sumner is virtually the 
history of the anti-slavery conflict. His speeches were marked 
by soundness of reason and stateliuess of style, and the fifteen 
published volumes of them make an imposing addition to our 



1S6 XATIOXAL LIFE AXD CULTURE 

literature. The speech on --The True G-randeur of Nations " is 
best remembered. Wendell Phillips was a platform orator, who 
made public speaking his life-work. His long service to the 
abolitionists made his name, like G-arrison's and Sumner's, 
almost synonymous with their cause. As an orator he added 
to the learning, grace, and polish of Everett, something more 
of personal force that grew out of real devotion, however mixed 
its motives, to a great moral piinciple. After the war he con- 
tinued in the lecture field. His best-known addresses are those 
on ••Tonssaint LOuvertiue' and --The Lost Arts. ' 

As a rule, the oratory of the pulpit leaves a less permanent 
record than that of the platform, and there is practically noth- 
ing to be added here to what was said on this subject in 
the chapter on religion and philosophy in New England. In 
that place were mentioned the Unitarian ministers, Channing 
and others, and also the Congregationalists Bushnell of Hart- 
ford and Beecher of Brooklyn. Doubtless Beecher was, though 
somewhat erratic, one of our most versatile and brilliant 
preachers. But even though we extend our survey beyond 
the time-limit of this chapter to the present day. we can find 
no other to mention by the side of these, unless it be Phillips 
Brooks (1835-1S93), late of the Protestant Episcopal church at 
Boston. The orator}' of the pulpit, as of the platform gener- 
ally, has distinctly waned. 

HIS TOBY AXD CRITICISM 

The historians, so-called, of the days of our earliest literature 
were scarcely entitled to that name. Whatever history they 
-wrote was in the natuie of chronicles or annals — dry, ill-con- 
nected, unexplained relations of occurrences, without the in- 
sight, imagination, and mastery of expression that were needed 
to make literature. On the other hand, whatever literature 
they wrote was the narration of pei^onal experiences, useful 
and entertaining, but without the breadth of vision and critical 



HISTORY AND CRITICISM 187 

spirit that would have made worthy history. Our real histo- 
rians — men with a mastery of facts, with a power of arranging 
and interpreting those facts, and with a definite artistic purpose 
— appeared only with the nineteenth century. 

Irving's excellent work in this field has already been de- 
scribed. Passing over, then, the names of the early and minor 
writers of the century — Sparks, the biographer, 
croft, with his worthy lives of Washington and Franklin; 

1800-1891. Hildreth, with his discriminating but uninteresting 
history of the United States; Palfrey, with his very able but 
also um'omantic history of New England; J. S. C. Abbott, 
with biographies and a history of the Civil War; and James 
Parton, a later biographer, with lives of Franklin, Yoltaire, 
and others, — we come to the name of one who, although by 
no means the greatest, was long the most conspicuous of our 
historians — George Bancroft. The publication of Bancroft's 
History of the United States, in ten successive volumes, ex- 
tended from 1834 to 1874, with a revised edition in 1883. How 
careful and exhaustive his researches were may be inferred 
from this fact, and also from the fact that the portion of our 
history covered by them extends only to 1789. It was a huge 
undertaking, to which Bancroft brought all the resources of 
wealth, training, and social and political influence — every- 
thing, in short, but genius. He lived at Washington where 
he had free access to the government archives, and he 
collected besides an enormous private library of transcripts 
of documents from all parts of the world. Invaluable, how- 
ever, as his great work is, its over-patriotic and slightly 
partisan bias prevents it from being accepted as a final author- 
ity, while its want of picturesqueness in matter and st3ie 
makes it hard to read, and puts it quite without the pale of 
literature. 

Two of our historians were attracted, like Irving, to foreign 



188 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

themes. It was William Hickling Prescott in favor of whom 

Irvino- crave up his long-cherished plan of writing a 

1796-1859. ' history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Pres- 

j. L. Motley, ^ott, a native of Salem, and a graduate of Harvard, 

lSU-1877. ^ iT/./.ii-,i 

devoted a lite oi scholarly leisure and partial blind- 
ness to that brilliant period of Spain's history when she was 
extending her empire over the new world. The result was a 
series of able and fascinating works : Ferdinand and Isabella 
(1837), The Conquest of Mexico (1843), and The Conquest of 
Peru (1847). The other of the two, John Lothrop Motley, 
of Boston, after trying law and feeling his way toward 
literature with several novels {Morton^s Hope., 1839, and 
Merry Mount, 1848), turned to history, and spent much 
of his life abroad in the study of the heroic period of the 
Netherlands in the days of William of Orange. He published 
Tlie Rise of the Dutch Republic in 1856. The romantic pict- 
uresqueness of the periods treated by both these writers was 
fairly equalled by the grace and animation of their stj^le, and 
they paralleled the triumph gained by Macaulay in England, of 
having their works read like so much romance. Schoolboys 
could turn from Irving and Cooper to Prescott and Motle}^ with 
scarcely any loss of interest. Prescott, however, was some- 
w^hat deficient in critical insight ; and Motley, though possessed 
of ample powers and exercising more restraint in his style than 
Prescott, treated his theme so narrowly that he was ' 'really not 
a historian, but a describer of mighty historic deeds." Thus 
it has come about that the supremacj^ among our historians, 
which was first awarded to one of these men and then to the 
other, has been gradually transferred to a successor of both. 
Francis Parkman, also a Boston and a Harvard man, 
resolved at the early age of eighteen upon the plan of the his- 
tory to which he devoted his mature years. He took an 
American theme, the "Story of the Woods," the tripartite 



HISTORY AND CRITICISM 189 

conflict that lasted for a century and a half between the 

English, the French, and the Indians, on the frontiers of the 

. „ , northern new world. In pursuit of his purpose he 
Francis Park- ^ l l 

man, undertook a journey to the Rocky Mountains, and 

1823-1893. spent some time in a village of the Sioux Indians. 
The hardships of the trip so impaired his already frail health 
that his life-work was done with weak and sometimes almost 
useless eyesight, and under painful nervous affliction. But he 
knew his ground and his facts with a minute specialist's know- 
ledge ; he had an intellect of philosophic breadth, acuteness, 
fairness, and accurac}^; and he was gifted with a delightful 
stjde. Nor was his theme essentially less attractive than those 
of his forerunners, while its nearness to the interests of Amer- 
ican readers gave it an enhanced national value. His first 
printed work. The California and Oregon Trail (1849), the 
record of his personal experiences, is read by boys as eagerly 
as Dana's Two Years Before the 3Iast, and is one of those real 
stories that are almost better than romances. It is filled with 
the fragrance of woods and streams and the fresh, free air of 
the plains and mountains. Parkman's series of histories began 
with the one that is last in historical order — The Conspiracy of 
Pontiac (1851). The publication of the other seven extended 
from Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) to A Half- 
Century of Conflict (1892). It is an admirable series, worthy 
of its great theme, and it sets Parkman, by common consent, 
among the historians of genius. 

Besides the formal historians there are certain other workers 
in the broad field of scholarly research and criticism who might 
justly claim a share of attention. There was Professor Ticknor, 
the first incumbent of the chair of French and Spanish which was 
founded a,t Harvard in 1817, and which was held later by Long- 
fellow and by Lowell. His important work was a History of 
Spanish Literature (1849), which was not only a pioneer in its 



190 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

field, but was so able and sound that it remains still a stand- 
ard authority. There was also Edwin Percy Whipple, a Bos- 
ton lecturer and critic, who in his books {Literature 
George Tick- and Lift', 1849; Literature of the Age of EJizaheth, 

ThOT* 

1791-1871. 1869; etc.), made some approach toward the kind 

^. p. Whipple, of philosophical criticism that is now held in highest 

1819-1886. , --T . .-,.■, . -, ,., 

esteem. Here, too, might be mentioned men like 
James T. Fields, the veteran Boston publisher and editor, and 
writer of Yesterdays with Authors ; George P. Marsh, the Ver- 
mont philologist; and Richard G-rant White, of New York, 
variously known as a Shakespearean scholar, a music and art 
critic, and a writer of popular philolog3\ But, though it 
would be easy to name many more, and some much better 
scholars than these, the number of men who have successfully 
combined sound scholarship with literary gifts is not large. 
The leaders among them were, of course, Longfellow, Lowell, 
and Holmes, and to these leaders must be accorded a treatment 
in proportion to their significance. 

HENBY WADSWOETH LONGFELLOW, 18(y7-1882 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born at Portland, Maine, 
February 27, 1807. The maternal line of the Wadsworths goes 
back to John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, two pas- 
sengers of 'the Mayflower who have found a quiet 
fame in The Courtship of Miles Standish. The Longfellows do 
not trace back quite so far on American soil, but there was a 
goodly. line of them in Massachusetts and in Maine — colonist, 
blacksmith, school teacher, judge, and lawyer. Henry Wads- 
worth, so named for a maternal uncle who had sacrificed his 
life before Tripoli in the war with Algiers, was the lawyer's son. 
There was no promise of poetry in his ancestry, perhaps, but 
some inspiration was to be drawn from his surroundings. For 
the Portland of his birth was both a beautiful and a busy town 



LONGFELLOW 191 

— a "Forest City" with miles of sea beach, and a port where 
merchant vessels from the West Indies exchanged sugar and 
rum for the products of the forests and the fisheries of Maine ; 
and these scenes, or the memory of them, directly inspired two 
or three of his best poems, notably My Lost Youth. 

We are told that he was almost a model boy— "true, high- 
minded, and noble ;" " remarkably solicitous always to do right ;" 
handsome, too; "sensitive, impressionable; active, eager, im- 
petuous, often impatient; quick-tempered, but as quickly ap- 
peased; kind-hearted and affectionate, the sunlight of the 
house. " His conduct at school was ' 'very correct and amiable. " 
He read much, being always studious and thoughtful, though 
never melancholy. The first book which ' 'fascinated his imagi- 
nation" was Irving's Sketcli^Booh; and it would be easy to point 
out more than superfici^ resemblances between Longfellow's 
poetry and Irving's prose, just as there are certain fundamental 
characteristics common to Bryant's poetry and Cooper's prose. 
The resemblance goes back to the character of the men. 
"The gentle Longfellow"' and "the gentle Irving" we say with 
equal readiness, nor forget that gentleness implies gentility, 
inherent nobleness and manhood. Out of such characters grow 
naturally long and unruffled lives, as out of such a character 
as Poe's grows almost inevitably a short and tragic one. 

Longfellow's education was obtained at the Portland Acad- 
emy and at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, where he had for 
classmates several youths who were afterward to become 
famous, — two in the world of letters, J. S. C. Abbott and 
Nathaniel Hawthorne. He began to write pretty, melodious 
little poems and to contribute both verse and prose to various 
struggling magazines while still an undergraduate. He was 
graduated in 1825. His father desired him to study law; he 
himself spoke, though not very seriously, of turning farmer; 
but a Chair of Modern Languages was about to be established 



192 NATIONAL LIFE AXD CULTURE 

at Bowdoin, and the trustees proposed that the young gradu- 
ate of scholarly and literary tastes should fit himself for it. 
Three years were accordingly spent in delightful study and 
travel in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, and the founda- 
tions were laid, not only of his scholarship, but of that pas- 
sion for the romantic scenery and lore of the old world which 
followed him, as it followed Irving, through life, and gave 
color and direction to so much of his work. 

He returned in 1829 to take the professorship at Bowdoin, 
a very young man for so dignified a position. He married 
„ ^ . , in 1831, and thouo;h his domestic life was sad- 

Professional ' ° 

Life; Prose dened by misfortunes, the beauty of it ma}' be judged 
Writings. from such poems as Footsteps of Angels and The Chil- 
dren's Hour. A second residence in Europe prepared the way for 
the Professorship of Romance Languages at Harvard, where he 
took up his duties in 1836. He secured rooms at the historic 
Craigie House overlooking the Charles River, — a house in 
which Washington had been quartered for some months when 
he came to Cambridsie in 1775 to take command of the Conti- 
nental forces. After his second marriage (his first wife died 
during his second residence in Europe) the house passed into 
his possession and became his permanent home. He was thence- 
forth one of the most prominent members — the real centre, 
Mr. Higginson declares— of that group of men, including Fel- 
ton, Sumner, Hawthorne, Agassiz, Lowell, and Holmes, who 
gave distinction to the Boston and Cambridge of earlier daj^s. 
He had already published, besides a translation of a French 
G-rammar and some translations from a Spanish poet, a Sketch- 
Book-VikQ series of effusions which he entitled Outre- Mer; a Pil- 
grimage Beyond the Sea (1833, 1834). In 1839 he published a 
second and more ambitious prose work, Hyperion, in which the 
experiences of his second journey to Europe were woven into 
a kind of romance. Inasmuch as the romance itself was largely 



LONGFELLOW 193 

autobiographical, the publication was in rather questionable 
taste. Besides, the book was sentimental in tone and luxur- 
iant in stj^le, so much so, Indeed, that it is difficult to under- 
stand to-day how it could have been the product of a man 
past thirty. But its translations and criticisms of German 
literature, which was then little known in America, were ser- 
viceable, and it can have done no harm l)y setting ' ' hundreds 
of readers a-dreaming of pleasant wanderings by the song- 
haunted German rivers." Ten years later he ventured to add to 
his meagre list of prose writings another romance, Kavanagh — 
a New England tale somewhat in the manner of Hawthorne 
but with little of Hawthorne's charm of stjde or spiritual 
insight. Poetry was as clearly Longfellow's proper medium 
as prose was Hawthorne's or Cooper's, and to poetry the main 
energies of his life were dedicated. 

In the same year in which Hyperion was published, ap- 
peared also his first volume of poetry, Voices of the Night. 
The Psahn of Life had been printed anonymously 

i^-r-^l^ft.c.^^^^ the year before, in the Knickerbocker Magazine, and 

Night,'' 1839. J ' J } 

had been circulated so widely that Longfellow took 
this means of declaring his authorship. The volume contained, 
in addition to a prelude and his translations, the two collections 
of verse, of eight poems each, which are now printed in his 
works under the general titles of "Voices of the Night" and 
" Earlier Poems." In one way the publication was as remark- 
able as the publication of Tennyson's early volume in Eng- 
land nine jenrs before ; for at least six of the eight poems 
for which the volume was named — Hymn to the Night, A 
Psalm of Life, The Reaper and the Floioers, Footsteps of An- 
gels, Floicers, Midnight Mass for the Dying Year — made their 
way instantly to a popularity that has scarcely diminished in 
sixty years. This may have been partly due to the dearth of 
good poetry in America ; yet the poems deserved their success, 



194 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

and they were received in England with equal cordiality. 
True, it is easy to pick flaws in them. Critics will continue to 
condemn the Psalm of Life for its preaching tone, its incoher- 
ent structure, its commonplace ideas, its trite phrases, haz}^ 
figures, and borrowed ornaments. But without shutting our 
eyes to these defects, which really exist, and without main- 
taining that the poem is of any high order of greatness, it is 
still possible to enjo}^ it and to understand why it has made 
such a wide and deep impression. It is sound at heart. So 
simple and melodious as to sing itself into the memory, it 
breathes at the same time an ardent courage and a cheerful 
faith. Its theme is life, and it is alive with Saxon energy and 
earnestness. It seems as useless to test it, like a more ambi- 
tious poem, by the ordinary canons of criticism as it would 
be to test thus a stray ballad or a religious hymn that has 
fixed itself in the affections of a whole people. 

The same is true of most of these early poems. One or two of 
them, perhaps, — the Prelude, Hymn to the Kiylit, Footsteps of 
Ai}(;cJ^. — are good by the more formal tests. But the primary 
reason of their success is plain. It lies in their character — 
their simple and sincere feeling and their sufficient art. Long- 
fellow was .faithfull}' following the counsel of the "distant 
voices" which Sir Philip Sidney heard three centuries ago— 

" Look, then, into thine heart, and write." 

And in all but range, this early volume has remained fairly 
representative of its author. It defined his position as the 
household poet, the poet of the masses in their better 
moods, when the common aspirations, joys, and even son'ows 
of life, come to them as beautiful things to be treasured in 
beautiful words. Longfellow exercised his powers in many 
directions afterward, but he did not climb much higher. 

The next book of verse, the Ballads and Other Poems of 



LONGFELLOW 195 

1841, shows one of the new directions his activity took. He 
was to be the sino-er of men and deeds as well as 
Ballads. ^£ musings and exhortations. The earlier tones re- 

appear in such a poem as Endi/miou, with its oft-quoted lines — • 

" No one is so accursed by fate, 
No one so utterly desolate, 
But some heart, though unknown, 
Responds unto his own" — 

and in the even more familiar Rainy Day, Maidenhood, and Ex- 
celsior; the new note is to be found particularly in The Vil- 
lage Blacksmith, like Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night an ex- 
altation of humble toil and reward, and in the two stirring 
ballads of The Skeleton in Armor and The Wreck of the Hes- 
perus. The difTerence in manner is as marked as the differ- 
ence in substance: — 

' ' And as to catch the gale 
Round veered the flapping sail. 
Death! was the helinsman's hail, 

Death without quarter ! 
Midships with iron keel 
Struck we her ribs of steel; 
Down her black hulk did reel 

Through the black water ! " 

Here is the metre of Drayton's Agincourt^ throbbing still with 
the old martial passion and not greatly excelled by Tennyson 
himself in the Charge of the Light Brigade. That Longfellow 
should have shown himself such a good ballad writer was 
scarcely to be expected when we consider the gentleness of 
his nature and the even niceness of his technique. In fact, 
he was not often successful in work that demanded intensity of 
feeling. His Poems on Slavery (1842) were merely pretty and 
polished when, to produce any effect worth producing, they 
should have been strong even to ruggedness. But let him be 



196 • NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

siven a storv to tell and he could tell it with both grace and 
vigor. 

It is impossible here to follow in detail the long list of vol- 
umes and separate poems which came from his pen in rapid 
succession, man}' of which have become household names. 
There were a few relative failures. The Spanish Student (1842) 
showed the versatile author in the role of dramatist. But really 
successful drama in America has thus far refused to be written; 
and this play of Longfellow's, while it contains pretty lyrics and 
makes entertaining reading, has little dramatic power and has 
never been staged. However, the poet's experiments eontinued, 
and in general met with wide success. The dreamily beautiful 
and pathetic idyl, EvnngeJine^ appeared in 1847 and immediately 
won its way to the hearts of a hundred thousand 
-Evangeiiner readers. A few critics Quarrelled with the hexam- 

1847. ^ 

eter lines because they were not classical hexameters, 
but their objections were unheeded. The tale of Acadie, of 
' ' the forest primeval ' ' and 

"the hearts that beneath it 
Leaped like the roe when he hears in the woodland the 
voice of the huntsman," 

a tale not dark enough to suit the fancy of Hawthorne, to 
whom it was first told by a friend of both writers, rightly 
seemed to Longfellow to have in it precisely those human ele- 
ments of faith and devotion that make the widest appeal. He 
accordingly took the story and retold it with picturesque acces- 
sories of landscape and fireside and with a musical flow of syl- 
lables that leave it little inferior to its great model, Goethe's 
Hermann unci Dorothea. It is something more, too, than a piece 
of literature. One feels that there is always hope for humanity 
so long as a great wrong like that done to the innocent peasants 
of Acadia can inspire such a noble protest as really underlies 
the simple tale of Evangeline. 



LONGFELLOW 197 

The collection of poems entitled The Seaside and the Fire- 
side, which appeared in 1850, contained, besides Resignation 
and other domestic and popular pieces, the poem of Longfel- 
low's highest patriotic reach, the allegory of The Buildi7ig of 
the Ship'. The lines of its closing apostrophe to the ship of 
state are known to have brought tears of emotion to the eyes 
of Lincoln during the anxious hours of his own pilotage: — 

"Thou, too, sail on, Ship of State ! 
Sail on, O Union, strong and great ! . . . 
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea ! 
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee. 
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears. 
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears. 
Are all with thee, — are all with thee ! " 

Five years later came another long poem, this time almost 
epic in character and scope. Longfellow was so much a lit- 
erary' craftsman that the critic of his work is constantly tempted 

to put its form foremost, and there can be no doubt 
''Hiawatha,'' 
,„,, that he sometimes selected the form beiore the 

1855. 

theme. In point of form The Song of Hiawatha 
was an even bolder experiment than Evangeline. The metre 
chosen was that of the Finnish Kalevala^ a poem then almost 
totally unknown to American readers. The measure is charac- 
terized b}' a trochaic beat, and by short (octosyllabic) unrhymed 
lines, constantly pausing, and overlapping by repetition of 
phrases, so that the narrative progresses slowly. It is pecul- 
iarly suited to the tales of a primitive people, being well 
adapted to memorizing, and gratifying to the sense of rhythm 
so strong in children and the untutored. That Longfellow had 
again chosen wisely was shown by his success. The worthiest 
and most picturesque traditions of the American Indians were 
woven into a connected story, whose charm was greatly height- 
ened by the novel melody of the verse. The very names were 



198 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

as notes of music • • from the lips of Nawadaha, the musician, 
the sweet singer. ' ' 

" In the vale of Tawasentha, 
In the green and silent valley. 
There he sang of Hiawatha, 
Sang the Song of Hiawatha, 
' Sang his wondrous birth and being, 

How he prayed and how he fasted, 
How he lived, and toiled, and suffered. 
That the tribes of men might prosper. 
That he might advance his people !" 

It was not long before the tales of Hiawatha's Fasting, of his 
Wooing, of Blessing the Cornfields, of The G-hosts and The 
Famine, were known practically wherever English poetry is read. 

It is wrong to claim for Hiaicatha any special significance as a 
poem with a native American theme, sprung from the soil. 
Longfellow sang, in a purely literary and romantic spirit, the 
traditions of a race that was to him alien and almost unknown, 
as an Englishman might turn into poetrj^ the legends of the 
aborigines of Australia. He idealized, too, far more than 
Cooper, and bej'ond all warrant. Local color and local truth 
are not the strong points of the poem. It must be accepted 
solely for the admirable work of art that it is. A more strictly 
native theme was that of The Courtship of Miles JSfandisJi, which 
followed in three years ; but the homel}^ Puritan tale, with its 
repetition of the manner of Evangeline, did not afford the poet 
quite the right inspiration, and it frequently lapses into mere 
prose. 

In 1854, the year before the publication of Hiaicatha, 

Longfellow resigned his professorship at Harvard that he 

might be free to pursue his more congenial, and by that time 

more profitable, literary work. In 1861 the happi- 

ness of his home life was broken by a calamitous 

accident. Mrs. Longfellow, while engaged in sealing up for 



LONGFELLOW 199 

her little daughters some packages containing curls of their 
hair, set fire to her dress and was fatally burned. The Cross 
of S710W, a sonnet written eighteen years afterward, gives us 
some hint of what Longfellow must have suffered. In the un- 
rest that followed this domestic affliction, further fed hj the 
anxieties of the Civil War, the poet turned for solace to the 
more mechanical exercise of writing tales and making transla- 
tions. The Tales of a Wayside Inn (the inn really existed in 
the town of Sudbur}^, and the characters introduced were actual 
friends of Longfellow, in slight disguise) appeared in 1863. 
Seven years later he had completed and published a work 
worthy at once of his scholarship and his genius, — a metrical 
3'et extremel}' literal translation of Dante's Divina Commedia. 
It fails, as perhaps all translations must fail, to catch the burn- 
ing intensity of the original, but all in all it is the most satisfac- 
tory verse rendering we have in English of a poem for which 
nothing but an absolutely literal translation will ever suffice. 
About the same time, too, he completed what he hoped would 
be his masterwork, the conception of which had in a sense ' 'dom- 
inated his literary life," namely, a trilogy which aimed to set 
forth Christianity in its ancient, mediaeval, and modern aspects, 
and which he entitled CTiristus: a Mystery. But the task was 
beyond his powers. The middle portion, ' 'The Grolden Legend, " 
which had been published twenty j^ears before, was fairly suc- 
cessful, but the other parts, ' 'The Divine Tragedy" and ' 'The New 
England Tragedies," are so little read that they are not always 
incorporated in his collected works. 

After this Longfellow attempted no more poems of large 
scope, though he continued to write many sonnets and minor 
pieces, from The Hanging of the Crane and Moritnri Salutanms 
down to that lyric of serene faith, The Bells of San Bias, writ- 
ten but a few days before his death. He died on the twenty- 
fourth of March, 1882, aged seventy-five. In 1884, a bust of 



200 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

Mm was placed in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbe}^, 

near the tomb of Chaucer, — England's gracious tribute to 

the renown of America" s best loved poet. 

The parallel between Longfellow and Irving, which has 

alread}^ been suggested, can be drawn further. Longfellow, also, 

kept pretty carefully to the beaten track where all could follow 

him. In the matter of form he knew well enough 

rificai -^^^ ^^ surprise his public, and he did so again and 

Summary. r l ■> o 

again ; but even these seeming novelties always turned 
out to be something old and approved. He preferred simple 
themes and simple language, refraining from any innovations 
that might repel. Thus he established himseff securely in his 
readers' affections, always meeting their expectations and 
making his name in a sense synonymous with American poetr}', 
— though not our greatest yet our leading singer b}" Airtue of 
his continuous, satisfying song. 

The supreme poetic gift, imaginative insight, was not his 
in any marked degree. Much broader than Bryant, his con- 
templations did not run so deep. Herein, too, he falls far be- 
low his English contemporary, Tennyson, of whom he was in some 
other respects so nearly the peer. He had no large visions, 
whether of the political destiny of America or of the moral 
and social destiny of man. He had little comprehension of 
the forces that were working such a change in his own gener- 
ation — theideasof liberty and equality, the new science, and the 
new education, that were rapidly emancipating both body and 
mind. Farther yet from him was it to see the images of 
beauty or terror which Poe saw beyond the veil of life. He 
had no power of conjury over the spirit world. Now and then 
he touched the heights, as in the vision of the majestic Hymn 
to the Night : — 

" I heard the trailing garments of the Night 
Sweep through her marble halls ! 



LONGFELLOW 201 

I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light 
From the celestial walls ! " — 

or in the figure inspired by the gun-barrels in the arsenal at 
Springfield ranged and shining like the pipes of an organ : — 

" Ah ! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary, 
When the death-angel touches those swift keys ! ' ' 

But these things are too infrequent to be considered character- 
istic : we do not recognize them as like Longfellow. He was 
something more than a poet of fancy, but in the fields of the 
imagination his range was in the lowlands. 

His faculty is best described as one that was mainly 
receptive and assimilative. He had a true instinct for beauty, 
and he showed his appreciation of any beauty in another's 
work by frankly borrowing it for his own. He never dis- 
graced it ; usually, unless it came from a very high source, he 
bettered it in the borrowing. If this was not genius, it was a 
talent for detecting and advertising genius, for turning to 
the best account the best that the world's literature could 
afford. For example, Tennyson published Locksley Hall, and 
immediately afterward Longfellow composed The Belfry of 
Bruges in the same metre and with something of the same 
phrasing. This practice, which came from his habit of com- 
posing in his study and relying on his books for inspiration, 
naturally brought upon him charges of imitating. Wide 
readers and critics, like Poe, knew the sources, and, as they 
read his poems, could not help being reminded of them. The 
nature of the imitation may be learned by comparing The 
Building of the Ship or Keramos with Schiller's Song of the 
Bell, or, for a minor instance. The Slave in the Dismal Swamp 
with Moore's Ballad, "They made her a grave, too cold and 
damp." But Longfellow never answered the charges, both 
because they were in part true and because, as far as they 



202 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

were true, there was nothing in them to cause him shame. He 
was acting honorably; even when the imitation was most 
obvious he added enough of his own to justify him, and 
all right-minded readers were grateful to him for exercising 
his faculty so happily. Besides, any doubt of his being a poet 
in his own right could always be allayed by turning to such 
songs of genuine, spontaneous utterance as The Bridge^ or The 
Day is Done^ or My Lost Youth. 

His versatility was greater than that of an}^ other American 
poet. Though most at ease in lyric poetry, he essayed also, 
as we have seen, both epic and dramatic, with the minor varie- 
ties of ballad and pastoral. As a stor3^-teller in verse he 
belongs to that band of English rhymers led by Chaucer and 
Scott. He was almost as thorough a romanticist, too, as Scott — 
steeped in medisevalism and G-ermanism. In form, his range was 
as wide as in substance. He tried all forms, and seemed to mas- 
ter one as easily as another, with the single exception of heroic 
blank verse, which was too stately for his agile Muse. But 
the mastership, which in blank verse he has to yield to Bryant, 
he holds in an equally difficult form. As a sonnet writer he has 
had no rival in America. Indeed, one might s apport the assertion 
that Longfellow wrote no greater poetry than is to be found in 
some of his sonnets, as the Divina Commedia series, Three 
Friends of Mine, Milton, or Nature. 

Through these things — his simplicity, his breadth, his 
receptive faculty, his versatility — Longfellow became our 
great teacher. He was a scholar himself, to begin with, — one 
of America's earliest and best. He was the first person on 
this side of the Atlantic to write upon Anglo-Saxon. He led 
many a student to a knowledge of the modern languages and 
literatures, and by his translations and adaptations spread far 
and wide their benignant influence. But most of all he assisted 
in the spread of culture through the subtle influence of his art. 



LONGFELLOW 203 

He was an artist to the finger-tips. In this respect he far outran 
Bryant and was a revelation to a Puritan world. And mark how 
he reached that world. Poe could not do it, for pure art and 
imagination would not avail. But Longfellow, though there were 
no theologians among his ancestors, had the strong moral bias 
of his New England environment; like Bryant, though in 
less degree, he was given to meditating and moralizing ; and 
all the while his readers, who went to him for counsel and 
cheer, were unconsciously succumbing to the witcheries of 
song and learning to like the very things they had been 
taught to fear or despise. It was but another step to the 
drama, to music, to painting and sculpture. Thus it be- 
came Longfellow's mission to soften the asperities of a nar- 
row creed and life. Perhaps the slight sentimentalism that 
clings to his work, as to Irving's, was a necessary part of this 
disciplinary task. We can pardon his fondness for exclama- 
tion points and pretty figures of speech when we contemplate the 
large result. Nor if, after we have learned to like such thinos 
as "footprints on the sands of time" and "forget-me-nots of 
the angels," we find that our poetic education is not complete 
until Tennyson and Shakespeare and Dante have taught us to 
dislike them again, should we turn with ingratitude from 
our first teacher, who made the second lesson possible. 

Finally, and once more like Irving, Longfellow has a high 
claim to our admiration in his fundamental, serene humanity. 
Scholarly though he was, bookish, and often getting his inspir- 
ation at second hand, he was never scholastic, technical, 
obscure, or dry. Love is more than wisdom, and in every 
line that Longfellow wrote there beats a kindly human heart. 
Rarely does he count to us intellectually so much as emotion- 
ally. He fought shy of analysis, put quietly by the problems 
and stress of his age, if indeed he felt them, remaining to the 



204 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

end an ardent lover of l)eaiity and peace; and over all his 
poetry broods 

" A Sabbath sound, as of doves 
In quiet neighborhoods." 

JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER, 1807-1892 

Another poet in whom love of human nature was a marked 
trait was born north of Boston in the same year as Longfellow — 
John G-reenleaf Whittier, Little of the scholar, 
A Farmer however, is to be found in this New England Quak- 
er, whose lot it was to pass from the plow to politics 
and from politics to literature. He was born in 1807 in East 
Haverhill, a rugged, hilly section of Essex County, in the ex- 
treme north-east corner of Massachusetts. In the southern part 
of the same county lies Salem, the birthplace of Hawthorne. The 
home of Whittier was in a country district ; the town of Haver- 
hill was three miles away, and to this day no roof is in sight 
from the old homestead. The house, considerably more than 
a hundred years old at the poet's birth, was built by his great- 
great-grandfather. The Whittiers were mostly stalwart men, 
six feet in height, who lived out their three-score and ten years. 
The poet, though his years were more than any of his immediate 
ancestors', fell a little short of the family stature and was of slen- 
der frame. He attributed his delicate health to the hard work and 
exposure of his youth. He milked cows, "grubbed stumps," 
built boulder fences, threshed grain with a flail, wore no flan- 
nels in the coldest weather, and woke often of winter morn- 
ings to find upon his coverlet siftings of snow. Something of 
this may be learned from Snow- Bound,yfhiGh. is a faithful picture 
of the Whittier homestead and household as they were eighty 
3^ears ago. 

It was a life utterly without luxury and with few means of 
culture. The famil}', however, was one of the most respected 



WHITTIER 205 

in the community, unci could draw to its fireside intelligent ac- 
quaintances, among them itinerant ministers of the Friends, to 
which sect it belonged. There were perhaps thirty books in the 
house, largely Quaker tracts and journals. Of course, there 
was the Bible, and through all his poetry Whittier reverts to 
the Bible for phrases and images as naturally as Keats reverts 
to classical mythology or Longfellow to mediaeval legend. 
Memorable were the evenings when the school-teacher came 
and read to the family from books he brought with him — one 
most memorable when the book was a copy of Burns. On 
Whittier' s first visit to Boston, an occasion honored by his 
wearing "boughten buttons" on his homespun coat and a 
l)road-brim hat made by his aunt out of pasteboard covered 
with drab velvet, he purchased a copy of Shakespeare. One 
of the Waverley novels, its author as yet unknown, fell into 
his hands and was read eagerly, — but the parents did not 
share in that reading. 

He attended the district school a few weeks each winter; 
the nature of his schooling may be judged from the poem 
To My Old ^Schoolmaster. When he was nineteen he com- 

c z. 1^ pleted his scanty education with a year at an acad- 
From School to^ "^ *^ 

Journalism emy in Haverhill. From the time when the reading 
and Politics. ^^ Burns woke the poet within him, he was con- 
stantly writing rhymes, covering his slate with them and some- 
times copying them out on foolscap. William Lloyd Garrison, 
soon afterward to be the leader of the abolition movement, had 
started his Free Press in a neighboring town. Whittier' s 
father, interested in all philanthropic enterprises, was a 
subscriber, and to it Whittier' s sister sent, without his knowl- 
edge, one of his poems. Thus began at once his literary and 
his political career. Garrison became interested in his new con- 
tributor, and the story has often been told of how the smart young 
editor drove out to the country home and Whittier was called 



206 ^MTIOXAL LIFE AXD CULTURE 

in from the field to meet him. It is not quite a parallel to the 
stoiy of CincinnatuS; but important things came of the meet- 
ing. Thi'ough the long anti-slaveiy agitation that followed, 
Gamson and he were close friends, often working side by side. 
Two yeare after the meeting:. Garrison, who was then editing a 
temperance paper in Boston, seciu'ed for him the editorship of 
a political journal there and he was soon in the thick of the 
tariff discussion, supporting Clay against Jackson in the 
campaign of 1832. He wrote in one of his letters, ''I would 
rather have the memory of a Howard, a Wilberforce, and a 
Clarkson than the und^-ing fame of B\'ron; " and thouo;h he 
was thinking of Byron's spirit rather than of his poetrw the 
declaration shows clearly that his interests lay less in literature 
than in political and social reform. 

The editorial work begun at Boston was continued at Hart- 
ford, but proved too trying for his delicate health, and he re- 
turned to the farm. When the farm was sold four years later. 
he removed with his mother and sister to Amesbury. Meau- 
Env d "^liile, he contributed much verse to the newspapers. 
agaimt But Ms interest in politics more and more over- 

s avenj. shadowed his other interests. "I have knocked 

Pegasus on the head," he wrote, '• as a tanner does his bark- 
mill donkey when he is past service." He was elected to the 
legislature of Massachusetts, and there were excellent prospects 
of his being nominated for Congress. The anti-slavery agita- 
tion, however, was growing, fostered especially by G-arrison's 
Liherator which was started in 1831, and as Whittier was soon 
seen to be an ardent supporter of the unpopular cause, his 
political prospects faded. No selfish considerations could pre- 
vent a man of his character from speaking out when he felt 
that the nation was guilty of harboring a great wrong. Quaker 
though he was, the fighting spirit was strong in him. It 
could be read in his piercing, deep-set eyes, aud it can be read 



WHITTIER 207 

in his verse. During his school days he had published anony- 
mously a poem called The Song of the Vermonters, 1779: — 

"Ho — all to the borders! Vermonters, come down, 
With your breeches of deerskin and jackets of brown; 
With your red woolen caps, and your moccasins, come, 
To the gathering summons of trumpet and drum." 

He disliked to acknowledge the authorship of so martial a 
poem, perhaps because he realized that the spirit of it was only 
too genuine. 

He flung himself into the new cause, heart and soul. He 
could not counsel taking up arms ; actual war, indeed, was a 
thing he dreaded. ' ' For one, I thank Grod that he has given 
me a deep and invincible horror of human butchery. " But all 
means short of war were to be tried. Both openly and pri- 
vately he helped with advice some of the great leaders of the 
North — Sumner, Seward, Grerrit Smith. Occasionally he took 
part in public meetings. In 1837 he went to Philadelphia to 
edit the Pennsylvania Freeman, and was there when Pennsyl- 
vania Hall was burnt by a mob in protest against an anti-slav- 
ery convention. He was once pelted with eggs in the streets 
of Concord, New Hampshire, and thirty years afterward sent 
the coat which he had then worn, and which had been kept as 
a relic, to the needy freedmen of the South. But most of all 
he assisted the cause with his poetry, to which he turned once 
more with the inspiration born of a noble purpose. The bark- 
mill donkey was transformed into a knight's charger, and not 
even the rider himself ever sneered at it again. 

Here was the real beginning of his career. Such poems as 
he had already published — Moll Pitcher, a poem of New Eng- 
land legendary life (1832), and the more ambitious 
lYprZu^n ^^^^^ ilfe^ojie (1836)— were only conventional and 
almost worthless exercises in rhyme. It was the 
Ballads and the Anti- Slavery Poems of 1837 and 1838 that won 



208 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

him a hearing and marked him as a poet with a mission — the 
accepted laureate of the Liberty party. Among the best of these 
poems were Toussaint U Ouverture, The Slave- Ships, Expostula- 
tioUj Tlie Hunters of Men, Stanzas for the Times, Farewell of 
a Virginia Slave Mother, The Pastoral Letter. The last named 
was called forth by a letter written by the Congregational min- 
isters of Massachusetts in which they pleaded that the per- 
plexed subject of abolition be not brought up for debate in the 
churches. Whittier's poem was a scathing rebuke of what he 
conceived to be most unchristian conduct: — 

' ' For, if ye claim the ' pastoral right ' 

To silence Freedom's voice of warning, 
And from your precincts shut the light 
Of Freedom's day around you dawning; 

' ' If when an earthquake voice of power 

And signs in heaven and earth are showing 
That forth, in its appointed hour, 

The Spirit of the Lord is going ! 
And, with that Spirit, Freedom's light 

On kindred, tongue, and people breaking, 
Whose slumbering millions, at the sight, 

In glory and in strength are waking ! 

"What marvel, if the people learn 
To claim the right of free opinion ? 
What marvel, if at times they spurn 
The ancient yoke of your dominion ?" 

No stronger or clearer voice for freedom had been raised in 
American letters since Tom Paine nerved the soldiers at Valley 
Forge and Philip Freneau hurled his hot verses at the head of 
George the Third. 

After 1844 Whittier gave up editorial duties altogether and 
became an established literary worker in the quiet of his Ames- 
bury home. In 1847 he began to contribute regularly to the 
National Era, a weekly organ of the Anti-Slavery Society estab- 







HEN-RY WADSWORTH LONGFELI.OM' OLIVER ^^•EIs•r)ELL HOLMES 

JAMES RtJSSELL LOWELL JOMN GREENLEAK AV'HIXXIER 



WHITTIER 209 

lislied at Washington, the paper, it may be remembered, in 
which Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's C'ai/Ji first appeared. Through 
this medium many of his better poems were published: Bar- 
clay of Ury, Angels of Buena Vista, Maud Muller, Burns, Mary 
Garvin, Ichahod. Ichahod — the meaning of the Hebrew name 
is "departed glory " — shows well the intensity of the passions 
aroused by the burning controversies of the time. The poem 
was published in 1850 shortly after Webster's Seventh of March 
Speech in support of Clay's compromise measures and the 
Fugitive Slave Law. In it the great leader was mourned as one 
already dead, since his weakness in that supreme moment 
Whittier could not but regard as dishonor and moral death. At 
such a time, he said, "if one spoke at all, he could only speak 
in tones of stem and sorrowful rebuke." Out of the war and 
its issues grew other strong poems, like the hymn Thy Will 
Be Done, or the ballad of Barbara Frietcliie, or the fervent 
and ecstatic La,us Deo that burst from him when the bells rang 
out for the passing of the constitutional amendment which 
abolished slavery and made 

^ ' the cruel rod of war 
Blossom white with righteous law." 

But the voice that had grown to such strength and clarity 
in the cause of liberty was returning again and again to 

the more purely lyrical notes it had essayed in 
Legendary youth. Two things always appealed strongly to 

Whittier's poetic imagination. One is the slender 
body of legendary lore that has come down from the colonial 
days of New England, including a few tales of the trials and 
persecutions of the early Quakers. The Bridal of Pennacooh, 
Mai^y Garvin, The Ranger, Mahel Martin, Marguerite, Cassandra 
Southwick, Barclay of TJry, Shipper Iresons Ride, and How 
the Women Went from Dover are all ballads that have been thus 



210 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

inspired. They show a wide range. There is the rude, saga- 
like \agor of Barclay of Ury (a tale, however, not of New 
England, but of the Scotch Quakers) ; and there is the homely 
picturesqueness of 

*' Old Fkid Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, 
Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt 
By the women o' Marble'ead. " 

Mary Garvin and Mabel Martin touch tender chords of sympa- 
thy. Marguerite is as pathetic as any poem in our literature, 
and Tlie Ranger is almost as melodious as any. 

The other favorite field of Whittier's imaginative exercise was 

the humble rural life in which his private interests were earliest 

centred. Lays of My Home, Songs of Labor, Home 

New England j^aUads, were the titles of some of his successive 
Idyls. ' 

volumes. He had himself learned the shoemaker's 
craft, he had driven cattle, he had worked in the cornfields, and 
he turned into brave-hearted song the duties and joys of the 
shoemakers, the drovers, and the buskers. He stands almost 
as a patron saint to that little man, the ' ' barefoot boy with 
cheek of tan." He felt, with the poor voter on election day, 
the full meaning of republican equality: — 

" Up ! clouted knee and ragged coat ! 
A man's a man to-day ! " 

If it was Robert Burns who woke the poet within him, it was 
because his heart beat with kindred sympathies and ideals, and 
the question which he asks of Burns, — 

" Who sweetened toil like him, or paid 
To love a tribute dearer ? " — 

might almost be answered with his own name. Doubtless, in 
the consideration of work of this nature, one is too easily be- 
guiled into praise and needs to remind himself of Matthew 
Arnold's protest against the immoderate estimation of Burns. 



WHITTIER 211 

But the critic might well forego his office for a moment in the 
presence of these idyls of Whittier, in which the simple but 
universal emotions of the natural man find such simple and 
natural expression. Surely it seems that the lingering mem- 
ory of youth's shy romance could call forth no more ten- 
derly wistful cry than My Playmate, or that time can never 
take the charm from A Sea Dream, or 31aud Midler, or Tell- 
ing the Bees, or that poem, In School-Days, which Dr. Holmes 
cried over and Matthew Arnold himself praised as perfect. 

Whittier never married. The little romances of his youth 
slipped quietly into memories and imparted a finer tone to the 

poetry of his mature years. The passions of his 
Behgwus manhood were expended in the cause for which 

he labored, and his affections were given up to 
his home, and to his mother and sister while they lived. But 
there was a stronger strain than all these, the strain of devotion 
to the simple religious faith he cherished and of love for the 
G-reat Love which he saw ruling the destinies of men and nations. 
We must therefore add to the three classes of poems we have 
already described — the poems of freedom, the legendary bal- 
lads, and the New England idyls — a fourth, the religious 
poems and hymns. That Whittier knew something of the 
trials of faith and the heart- shaking questions that assailed the 
man in the land of Uz is shown by his dramatic My Soul and 
I, and the yearning Questions of Life : — 

'* I am : how little more I know ! 
Whence came I? Whither do I go? 
A centred self, which feels and is ; 
A cry between the silences ; 
A shadow-birth of clouds at strife 
With sunshine on the hills of life." 

But these were passing moods. The full confession of his 
faith — a confession that leaves no place for doubt or despon- 



212 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

dency — is rather to be sought in such later poems as My 
Psalm, Trust, Revelation, The Over-Heart, The Eternal Good- 
ness. 

It was after the war. and after the sad break in his domes- 
tic life caused by the death of his sister Elizabeth, that Whit- 
tier's mind set like an ebbing tide toward the sea of 
^'Snoic-Bound ^^^^ memories ; and then came the composition 
''The Tent on of Snow-Bound, an idyl of winter and of home- 
1867^'"''^' ^^^ ^ ^^^ Arcadian age of New England. Even 
for a second generation of readers, description or 
praise of it seems almost superfluous, so securely has this 
poem, with its simple rustic pictures and its deep religious 
faith, maintained itself in the popular afliection. It bids fair 
to take rank with such classics as The Cotter's Saturday Xight 
and The Deserted Village; in America it is to-day more widely 
read than either. The Tent on tJie Beach of the year following 
was another large composition, but less coherent. It was 
such a sheaf of stories as an aging poet likes to gather, and 
makes a kind of companion piece to Longfellow's Tales of a 
Wayside Inn. 

For just a quarter of a century longer Whittier was spared, 
to complete mam* other volumes and separate poems. He 
would not venture to visit that • • night- mare confusion of the 
world's curiosity shop," the Centennial Exposition 
^^■^^.^ of 1876 at Philadelphia, but he wrote the stately 

hymn that was sung at its opening. His last years 
were spent quietly with his relatives at various places in the 
Essex County neighborhood. He died at Hampton Falls, 
New Hampshire. September 7, 1892, in the eighty-fifth year 
of his age ; and Holmes was the only one of the great New 
England group left to mourn his departure : — 

" Best loved and saintliest of our singing train, 
Earth's noblest tributes tothv name belong. 



WHITTIER 213 

A lifelong record closed without a stain, 

A blameless memory shrined in deathless song. ' ' 

Whittier's rise to national fame was comparatively slow. 

He never obtruded himself as a poet, nor made bids for 

critical appreciation. Those who were most deeply 

Bard and interested in the abolition of slavery and who 

Philanthropist. -^ 

came to know him early and well, scarcely thought 
of him as a poet but rather as a rhyming champion of the 
cause they had at heart. But he gradually endeared himself 
to the hundreds who read poetry for its own sake, and by 
almost imperceptible degrees, and especially after the estab- 
lishment of the Atlantic Monthly and his contributions to it, 
he came to be generally recognized as a worthy member of 
the New England group who already counted him one of 
themselves. Finally, the publication of Snow-Bound with its 
sustained beauty and intense human quality set him quite out 
of the ranks of occasional singers and left no doubt of his place. 
His reputation has grown steadily ever since ; and it seems 
likely to endure, for it rests upon a genuineness that is above 
all suspicion. However much we may talk of the genuine- 
ness of Bryant or Longfellow or Lowell, that of Whittier is 
seen to be of a still finer strain. It was equalled only by 
Emerson's. And Whittier got closer to the hearts of the 
people by being free from Emerson's skyey philosophy. If 
Longfellow was a poet for the people, Whittier was a poet 
of the people. He was content to use the verj^ dialect of the 
people he knew and loved, and protested to his publisher that 
in that dialect war and law^ Martha and swarthy., 'pasture and 
faster, were good rhymes. Uncultured he might be called; 
he did not care. He looked at life through no medium of 
tradition or false education. Standing in what Carlyle would 
call a close first relation to men and things, his were the ideal 
conditions of a bard. 



214 NATIONAL LIFE AND CtlLTURE 

Moreover, he brought to those conditions the sufficient gifts, 
first, the native impulse, and second, the power of song. He 
was a poet, not by choice and cultivation, as Longfellow, nor 
by fitful inspiration, as Bryant, Emerson, and Lowell, but 
always and uncontrollably, by high compulsion. His num- 
bers were never studied. Like Emerson, he sang instinct- 
ively in the primitive four-beat measure ; only, rhythmical and 
musical language came to him far more easily than to Emer- 
son. He who idealized humble life and toil like Burns, sang 
with the lyric ease of Burns. 

The slight valuation he set upon his gifts must itself go to his 
credit. Bard though he was, he refused to regard himself as such, 
steadfastly putting life first and poetry second. Thus he came, 
in mature manhood, to devote his whole energj^ to the eradica- 
tion of our national crime. It was poetry's loss, possibly, and 
may account for the fact that we have scarcely any single work 
of magnitude from his pen; for the fruit of this productive 
period of his life is to be sought in our social and not in our 
literary history. The literature that he produced then we must 
to-day account of minor value: no number of Ichahods or of 
Pastoral Letters can outweigh one Marguerite or one Sea- 
Dream. Yet Whittier himself would have been the last to 
deplore the loss. That his poetry written with a purpose was 
of less literary value than his products of calmer art he would 
acknowledge, rejoicing still that his life had come to be domi- 
nated by such a noble purpose. We have only to read his 
Proem to discover the modesty of his own claims so far as rank 
in literature is concerned. He was satisfied if he could be 
written down as one who loved his fellow-men, one, in the words 
of the prelude of Among the HiUs, who gave his prayers and 
strength to lift manhood up 

" Through broader culture, finer manners, love, 
And reverence, to the level of the hills." 



LOWELL 215 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1SW-18D1 

Of the writers of first importance whom we have thus far 
treated, only Thoreau was born later than 1809. With James 
Russell Lowell, whose birth fell on the twenty- second of 
February, 1819, we are carried forward a full decade. But 
Lowell began his work so early and was so closely associated 
with the other great New England writers that he must be 
regarded as virtuall}" their contemporar}^, a junior member of 
the group. One part of his fame, and in all probability the 
most enduring part, belongs to the ante-bellum period. 

The early surroundings of Whittier and of Lowell present 
nearly as striking a contrast as the conditions of New England 
life could aflford. The two men were alike in being 
ences. descended from families of sterling worth, but in 

other respects Lowell was far more favored, having 
all the means and incentives to culture which Whittier 
lacked. The Lowell famil}^, in its several branches, has 
long been prominent in Massachusetts. The city of Lowell 
was named in honor of Francis Cabot Lowell, an uncle 
of the poet, who introduced cotton manufacturing into the 
United States; the Lowell Institute at Boston, with its free 
lectures on religion, science, and art, was the gift of Fran- 
cis Cabot's son; the poet's grandfather drafted the anti- 
slavery clause in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights; his father, 
the Reverend Charles Lowell, was for more than fifty years 
a minister of Boston; his elder brother, Robert Traill Spence 
Lowell, and his sister, Mrs. Putnam, both became writers of 
some note. 

James Russell, the youngest son of the family, was born 
at Cambridge, in the beautiful home known as Elmwood, and 
lived and died there. In this he was more fortunate than most 
Americans, Avho, said Holmes, are "all cuckoos — we make our 
homes in the nests of other birds." The house at Elmwood 



216 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

was, like Craigie House, an historic place of Revolution- 
ary memories ; and the secluded, ample grounds made a fine 
rural refuge for a youth of poetic fancies. To understand 
fully what this home meant to the poet, both in youth and in 
maturity, one should read his Indian Summer Reverie and 
Under tlie Willows. Nor was there only wealth for the nature- 
lover out of doors ; there were also treasures for the lover of 
books within. The Lowell library was the accumulation of 
several generations of scholarly men, and Lowell, familiar 
almost from infancy with books that Whittier even in the 
studious leisure of his old age never looked into, used to fall 
asleep to the reading of Spenser and the old English 
dramatists. 

Possibly these advantages carried with them disadvantages. 
Lowell in his youth was shy, over-sensitive, and perhaps over- 
proud. Certainly it is hard to discover in his early letters the 
manliness and simplicity into which he finally matured. He was 
sent to Harvard as a matter of course — was a sophomore there 
in 1836, when Longfellow succeeded Ticknor as Professor of 
Romance Languages, and heard Emerson's address on The Amer- 
ican Scholar in the fall of 1837. In the last year of his resi- 
dence he was one of the editors of the college magazine, 
Harvardiana. He was elected class poet ; but for some delin- 
quency or offence, about which mystery seems still to hang, he 
was "rusticated" by the Faculty. That meant that he was 
banished to Concord to finish his studies privately, and that 
he could not be present on Class Day or read his poem, though 
he was allowed to return on Commencement Day and take his 
degree. Naturally he conceived a boyish dislike for Concord 
and for the Transcendentalism with which he came into some 
contact there. Emerson he regarded as ' 'a good-natured man 
in spite of his doctrines." 

At the time of his graduation he was quite as undecided 



LOWELL 217 

upon a "career" as Longfellow had been, and was apparently 
without Longfellow's bias toward scholarship and literature. 
He actually thought of all the professions in turn and also of 
mercantile life. He studied law, and indulged for a while in the 
delight of paying office-rent, but never really practiced. He 
did a little aimless contributing to magazines, and he published 
an unimportant volume of poems, A Year's Life, in 1841. The 
real turning-point of his life seems to have been his marriage 
to Maria White in 1844. She was a woman of beauty and of 
culture, and was possessed moreover of a sensitively humane 
spirit. The anti-slavery movement, which was just then 
making rapid headway, engaged her sympathies, and, possibly 
through hers, Lowell's. The man who in his class poem 
had ridiculed the abolitionists, was soon found writing on their 
side; and the history of Lowell from this time on is the his- 
tory of an earnest, large-hearted, broad-minded man — a poet, 
a scholar, a statesman, and a patriot. 

The four years from 1844 to 1848 were among the most 

productive and happy in Lowell's life. In the first of these 

years he published a second volume of poems, this 

irsf iterary ^^j^q attractinoj some favorable attention. Then, 
Period. ^ ' 

under the influence of the public excitement aroused 
by the admission of Texas into the Union, a movement gener- 
ally regarded as aiming at the extension of slave territory, he 
wrote The Present Crisis, revealing at once both the moral 
earnestness and the poetic fire that were latent within him : — 

" Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, 
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side." 

It was indeed a "dolorous and jarring blast," so charged 
with indignation as to arouse the most apathetic reader in its 
own day and so informed with the spirit of righteousness that 
its echoes ring yet :— 



218 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

" Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." 

The two great products of these years, however, were 
The BigJow Papers and The Vision of Sir Launfal. The 

Mexican War followed upon the annexation of 
Paperf^'^^^ Texas, and all who held Lowell's sentiments of 

justice and honor were more indignant than ever. 
In the summer of 1846 a regiment was raised in Boston, and 
Lowell was moved by the sight of a recruiting officer on the 
streets to write what he called "a squib" and send it to the 
Boston Courier : — 

" Thrash away, you'll hev to rattle 

On them kittle-drums o' yourn, — 
'Taint a knowin' kind o' cattle 
Thet is ketched with mouldy corn." 

In keeping with its Yankee dialect, it was signed "Hosea 

Biglow." Other poems of a similar character followed, and 

they proved so popular that in 1848 Lowell issued the series 

in a volume, with numerous interesting prefaces and letters 

purporting to come from one "Parson Wilbur," who played 

the role of friend and adviser to the young rustic poet, Hosea. 

The third number, "What Mr. Robinson Thinks," which 

grew out of a little passage in local politics, had, upon its 

first appearance, run like wildfire over the reading public of 

America, and, we are told, of England. Everywhere could 

be heard the refrain — 

'' But John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez he wunt vote fer Guvener B. " 

Another happy hit was "The Pious Editor's Creed," with its 

declaration — 

*' I don't believe in princerple, 
But oh, I du in interest." 



LOWELL 210 

But the hardest knocks were reserved for the war and slav- 
ery. Lowell's quick native sense of humor — for these papers 
belong also very distinctly to the literature of humor — did him 
double service. It afforded an outlet for his feelings, leav- 
ing him personally even-tempered and happy in most trying 
times ; and it enabled him to reach an audience that remained 
unmoved by the sober appeals of men like Glarrison, Phillips, 
and Whittier. People who, with no particular sympathy for 
his sentiments, read the Blgloio Papers for the wit and humor 
that were in them, came often upon passages that compelled 
them to stop and think : — 

'* Ef you take a sword an' dror it, 
An' go stick a feller thru, 
Guv'ment aint to answer for it, 
God'll send the bill to you." 

Such doctrine was sometimes called unpatriotic, but Lowell 
scarcely needed to answer that charge. Hosea Biglow was 
thoroughly loyal ; as Parson Wilbur jestingly put it, ' ' In the 
plowing season, no one has a deeper share in the well-being of 
the country than he," It was patriotism with conscience 
added. The conscience of Puritan New England was speaking 
out, just as it had always spoken, and it was indisputably mak- 
ing itself heard. A second series of the papers was written 
during the Civil War, and contained, along with much of the 
same piercing satire as marked the first series, the beautiful 
" Suthin in the Pastoral Line." Among the prefatory mat- 
ter there was published with both series ( revised in the 
second) that unique picture of Yankee life known as Tlie 
Courtin\ which an Edinburgh critic has called "one of the 
freshest bits of pastoral in the language." 

From The Biglow Papers to The Vision of Sir Laiuifal is a 
far cry. But Lowell, like Whittier, could turn from the heat 
and strife of public affairs to the solace of pure poetry, and 



220 iSTATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURJE 

" build a bridge from Dreamland for his lay." One of the 

most spiritually significant of the legends that have come 

down from the early days of Christianity, namely. 

"T'^eFtsiono/ the Quest of the Holy Grail, the cup of emerald from 

Sir Launfai:' i- , ^ 

which Christ drank at the last supper, gave Lowell 
an inspiration, and within forty-eight hours, so we are told, 
the poem of knightly aspiration and brotherl}^ love was written. 
The subject was handled freely ; there was not much attempt 
to preserve the legendary atmosphere. Holmes found fault with 
the dandelions and the Baltimore oriole '-in the tableau of the 
old feudal castle." But the freshness, ^igor, and beauty of the 
poem have been universally praised. It makes one think of 
the rapturous song of Shelley's skylark that ' ' from heaven or 
near it" pours his full heart 

" In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." * 

Holmes might well forget, as many years later he declared he 
forgot, -that Lowell was ' • a wit and a humorist, a critic and an 
essayist," in the presence of such buoyant, palpitating poetry. 
A third work, published in this same year 1848, but of a 
much lower order of merit, was A Fable for Critics. It was a 

long criticism in rhyme of the American writers who 
ff',-f'^ ^f were then prominent, and it was so penetrating, 

so illuminating, and so witty, that it is constantly 
quoted still. To say that it was always temperate or just would 
be going too far, and we should be on our guard against giv- 
ing too much weight to its criticisms. We must remember 
that Lowell was still a young man under thirty, writing in 
this case anonj'mously, with every temptation to be witty and 
satirical. He over-praised Willis, as did almost everybodj' 
else; he could not fairly estimate men without humor, like 

♦Professor Wendell, however, in his Literary History of Amejica, says: "One 
of the traits for which you must search Lowell's volumes long is lyrical spon- 
taneity." 



LOWELL 221 

Bryant and Cooper; he said altogether too little of Poe, and 
altogether too much of Margaret Fuller (" Miranda"), whom 
he scored unmercifully. But his appreciation of Hawthorne 
before Hawthorne's greatest work was done was much to his 
credit, and many of his happily-phrased estimates, like that of 
Emerson as ''a G-reek head on right Yankee shoulders," de- 
serve to be long remembered. 

Lowell's wife died in 1853 and he married again in 1857. 
In the meantime he had made several trips to Europe, and 
upon his return from the second trip he entered upon 
LUerary what might be called the second fruitful period of 

Period. j^.g YiiQ^ He was appointed to the Smith Profess- 

orship of Romance Languages at Harvard upon Longfellow's 
resignation, and assumed his duties there, which extended 
over a period of twenty years, in 1856. In the spring of 1857 
he attended a memorable dinner-party given by the pub- 
lisher, Mr. Moses D. Phillips, and his "literary man," Francis 
H. Underwood, who were proposing to establish a literary 
magazine. The arrangement of the table at that party was 
as follows: 

Phillips 
Emerson Longfellow 

Holmes Motley 

Lowell Cabot 

Underwood 

The next autumn the magazine was duly launched — the third 
important enterprise of this kind in the annals of Boston pub- 
lishing. The North American Review., it will be remembered, 
was established there in 1815, and the short-lived Dial in 
1840. The new magazine was named, at the suggestion of 
Dr. Holmes, The Atlantic Monthly; Lowell was given the 
editorship; and within six months it was declared, on high 
authority, to be at that time ' ' unquestionably the best maga- 



222 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

zine in the English language." It represented far more 
than talent — it represented tbe best literary genius that 
the Atlantic states could boast, and that means the high- 
est literary genius that America has yet produced. After 
four years Lowell resigned his editorship to James T. Fields, 
and a little later became joint editor with Charles Eliot Norton 
of The North American Review; but he continued to make contri- 
butions to the Atlantic, both in verse and in prose. At the be- 
ginning of the war his touching Washers of the Shroud appeared 
in it, and the second series of The Biglow Papers was published 
in its pages. The interest with which he followed the events 
of those terrible years was deepened and saddened by the loss 
of three nephews who fought on the side of the Union. There 
are pathetic references to them, both in The Biglow Papers 
and in the introduction of his essay On a Certain Condescension 
in Foreigners. At the close of the war, Lowell composed, in 
another white heat of poetic ardor, and recited at the Harvard 
Commemoration, his uneven but lofty Commemoration Ode, 
with its noble tribute to Abraham Lincoln, ' ' Our Martyr- 
Chief, " and its fervent, benediction- like close, beginning — 
"Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release ! " 
But the chief product of this second period of Lowell's 
activity is to be sought in his prose essaj^s. Late in life he 
was ripening into that scholarship of which he had 
seemed so careless in youth but for which his youth 
had been such an excellent preparation. In 1864 he pub- 
lished Fireside Travels; in 1870 and 1876 the two series of 
Among My Boohs; and in 1871 My Study Windows, — so named 
(the name was given by the publishers) perhaps because the 
study windows look not only in upon books but also out upon 
the garden and the busy world beyond. Most of the essays are 
critical and find their themes in English and foreign literature 
— Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Emerson. But there 



LOWELL 223 

is a considerable range outside of literature, and the ordinary 
reader is likely to care more for the discursive essays on gen- 
eral themes, such as My Garden Acquaintance^ A Good Word 
for Winter, and Cambridge Thirty Years Ago. It would be 
impossible to select from them any single passage that would 
give a fair idea of either their substance or their manner, so 
diversified i§ the one and so mutable the other. But to those 
who would know Lowell at his most centralized and best, — 
Lowell the man rather than Lowell the scholar, — the opening 
of the essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners may be 
commended as revealing something of the interior charm to 
which occasionally, thrusting aside more showy qualities, 
he ventured to give expression. 

The field of Lowell's usefulness was to widen still further. 
As poet, as essayist, and as editor, he had served the cause both 
of American nationality and of American literature, 
and he was called upon to continue this double serv- 
ice in another capacity. In 1877 he was appointed Minister 
to Spain, where Irving had been sent more than thirty years 
before; and in 1880 he was transferred to the court of St. 
James. There he distinguished himself by tact, courtesy, 
and wisdom, and won the admiration of the English people. 
The disinterested character of their admiration was shown by 
their hearty applause of an act that called for no little courage 
from him — the delivery at Birmingham of an address on Democ- 
racy. Critics there had been, on this side of the water, out- 
spoken in their censure of Lowell's friendliness for the English 
aristocracy, but they were silenced by this address. It was 
the mature declaration of his political faith, breathing the 
purest Americanism, and it constituted a fitting culmination to 
a life of consistent loyalty. 

Returning to America in 1885, Lowell continued to deliver 
addresses, both at the Lowell Institute, and on public occasions 



224 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

at various places when his strength would permit. He wrote 
poems, too, and published in 1888 Heartsease and Rue, a final 
volume. He died in 1891, at the age of seventy- two. On the 
publication of his letters by Professor C. E. Norton two years 
later— the most charming letters that American literature can 
yet show— something of the Lowell that was known to his 
friends and companions was revealed to the wider public, to 
whom his name was already as famiUar as Longfellow's and 

Emerson's. 

In quantity, Lowell's poetry compares pretty evenly with 
Whittier's, considerably exceeding the meagre product of Bry- 
ant or Poe, but falling short of the fecundity of 
Eis Poetry. j^^^gf eHo^, In character, too, it occupies a place 
between the narrow, exalted verse of the two former poets, 
and the easy charm and universal popularity of the latter's. 
Lowell was widely popular, almost from the first. The maga- 
zines were quite as eager to publish his work as they were to 
publish Longfellow's. But that he satisfied some temporary 
craving of the people rather than any perennial hunger is 
shown by the fact that his collected and reprinted works never 
sold so widely. Longfellow's books lay on every family table, 
and the family, moreover, was familiar with their contents. 
Lowell's name was almost as well known, but his books not 
so intimately. On the other hand, while readers of more dis- 
cernment were inevitably attracted by his many masterly qual- 
ities of both mind and heart, it cannot be said that he ever 
made upon them quite the same depth and intensity of impres- 
sion that was made by Bryant and by Poe, or even by Whittier 
at his best. The variety and the high quality of his work m 
other fields than poetry, however, have helped him to a position 
of greater conspicuousness than theirs. In any list of Amer- 
ican writers given off-hand, Lowell's name is pretty sure to be 
found near the first. 



LOWELL 225 

Although, as just intimated, few of Lowell's minor poems 
have fixed themselves indelibly in the minds of readers, all will 
concede to them sterling qualities — the devout worship of 
nature, for instance, that informs such poems as To the Dande- 
lion and Pictures from Appledore, the human tenderness and 
pathos of Tlie First Snoio-Fall and After the Burial, the G-reek 
beauty of Rhcecus, or the equally compelling if more modern 
charm of a poem like Hehe: — 

"I saw the twinkle of white feet, 
I saw the flash of robes descending ; 

Before her ran an influence fleet 
That bowed my heart like barley bending." 

Doubtless Lowell's pure poetry — and by this is meant poetry 
written for poetry's sake — is found at its best in the longer 
Vision of JSir Launfal. It is a poem such as a man must write 
in youth or not at all — a poem of boundless faith and high 
ideals, and all-including worship of beauty and purity. And 
the poem is for youth: teachers know that it is a positive 
moral force in our schools to-day. We are scarcely willing to 
accept it, however, as a product of high poetic genius. It is 
conceived so much in the artistic spirit, makes so much of form, 
that we cannot, as in the case of Emerson's Threnody, waive 
the tests of art; and yet it is defective in art. It is marred by 
haste and carelessness, it has faulty figures and discordant lines. 
It was not to be expected, perhaps, that Dr. Holmes should take 
kindl}' to its metre — the "rattlety bang sort of verse," he 
called it, that was revived in Coleridge's Christahel. But 
Christahel is everywhere musical; it contains no such lines as 
" Hang my idle armor up on the wall," — 
"And through the dark arch a charger sprang," — 
"And the wanderer is welcome to the hall." 
This last line may be read in three, five, or six feet, but scarce- 
ly in four, the number it should have. Even the first four lines 



226 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

of the famous description of June, wiiich as a whole is scarcely 
to be surpassed for intoxicating rapture, are confusing in im- 
agery and unsatisfying in rhythm. Fine as the poem is, it is 
not quite fine enough. It needed, in addition to its genuine 
inspiration, the perfect art of a Tennyson, and it lacks that art. 
Lowell was confessedly indolent in such matters, but it seems 
more than likeh' that the defect was an inherent one ; he never 
acquired the perfect art. Late in life he wrote his longest and 
most ambitious poem. The Cathedral. It was as distinctive as 
a poem could well be — no one but Lowell could have written 
it. It was brilliant, profound, stimulating; but it was over- 
weighted with thought, and the adornments of wit were made 
to supply the place of the adornments of art. Besides, the earh' 
spontaneit}" was missing. At its best the poem was sensuous 
and even passionate, but it was almost never fresh or simple. 
Emerson, who was asked to review it, refused, seeing too 
clearly that the Muses' well had ceased to flow and that the 
poet '-had to pump." 

G-reatest after all are his occasional poems — The Bigloio Pa- 
j3e?'5 and the Commemoration Ode. Lowell had a rare knack of 
penetrating to the heart of men and events. He saw the uni- 
versal beneath the local, the eternal beneath the temporal. And 
so out of a country courtship he made a national poem, and 
created lasting types of character out of an unscrupulous politi- 
cian, a cowardly Congressman, a fawning candidate, a time- 
serving editor. In spite of the fact that he was a scholar he 
almost paralleled the achievement of Burns and became the 
mouth-piece of a clan. The BigJoio Papers are Yankee to the 
core, perpetuating the dialect with its racy idiom, and the 
character with its shrewd wit and homely wisdom. As satire 
they rank with the best in literature, and the}' rise above most 
satire in the manliness of their tone and the sacredness of their 
cause. The Commemoration Ode^ too, though marred by some 



LOWELL 227 

of the same defects as The Vision of Sir Launfal^ is the best 
poem evoked by the Civil War and its consequences. It is 
Northern, yet national, — patriotic with a patriotism chastened 
by sorrow into something inexpressibly noble. 

Lowell's abundant wit and his broad and sufficient, even 
if not remarkably deep or- sound, scholarship, show to best 
advantage in his prose. He read much and remem- 
bered all, and could marshal his knowledge at any 
moment to serve his immediate ends. The richness of his 
prose, both in substance and style, is amazing. The variety of 
knowledges he lays under contribution for the illustration and 
adornment of his ideas exceeds, one is almost tempted to say, 
that of Macaulay and Carlyle combined. There is one sentence 
in his essay on Swinburne's Tragedies that draws on G-reek, 
Latin, philology, ps3''chology, optics, inebriation, and Mississippi 
steamboat navigation. The sentence just before it has a tech- 
nical term from metrics, the sentence before that a figure from 
free-masonry, and the sentence before that a technical term 
from the Old French law. Every one who knows Lowell's 
prose know^s, too, that this is scarcely an extreme instance. 
The allusions are often so profuse as to discourage all but very 
well-informed readers, while for those who can understand and 
enjoy them the reading is turned into a kind of intellectual 
debauch. Allusion is packed within allusion, metaphor within 
metaphor, like a Chinese wooden-egg. Or, to change the figure, 
his fancies loom up one behind the other like the roofs, towers, 
and steeples of a distant city. You never know when you have 
found all that is hidden in one of Lowell's pages. 

Again, his Qtj\Q is a st3'le of infinite paraphrase. The com- 
monest ideas take on most fanciful disguises and seldom 
does anything reappear without changing its form. Holland 
gin becomes a "Batavian elixir," a negro minstrel an "Ethi- 
opian serenader;" a coat of whitewash is a " candent baptism ;" 



228 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

a lying tramp is a "beggar." a ••vagrant." a •• heroic man on 
an imaginary journey," a "seeker of the unattainable," an 
"abridged edition of the Wandering Jew;" the barber who 
makes a slip 6f the shears " oversteps the boundaries of strict 
tonsorial prescription and makes a notch through which the 
phrenological developments can be distinctly seen"! More- 
over, Lowell sees the humorous side of everything, and wit spark- 
les everywhere — sometimes indeed to the offence of good taste. 
He is an inveterate punster. It would be difficult to find 
anywhere else in the same space as large a number of good 
puns as may be found in his published letters. But when we 
find the same sort of thing in serious essays, we cannot ap- 
prove. Wit is for the passing moment and looks ghastly 
graven on a monument. 

True, these are lordly, generous qualities, and they have 
the additional grace of coming unsought; for Lowell does not 
strive to be affluent — he cannot avoid being so. Mr. Stedman 
has somewhere said, speaking of poetry, that •• Lowell has 
sprinkled the whole subject with diamond dust." So he has 
sprinkled everything: to be spendthrift is his function. But 
while we envy him his brilliant gifts we cannot help wishing 
that he had learned and exercised greater restraint, or that he 
had cultivated more sedulously certain finer qualities. Now 
and then he curbs his high spirits and tempers his exuberance 
with a quiet, pensive strain. But in general the temptations to 
adornment and to mirth are too strong for him. The result 
shows in that want of fine texture and harmonious tone for 
which his work is often criticised. Nothing, for example, could 
well be better than the first paragraph of the essay On a Certain 
Condescension in Foreigners; and, so far as a sense for harmony 
of style is concerned, few things could be worse than the four- 
teenth paragraph of the same essay. The balances of dignity, 
refinement, grace, pathos, and all the qualities that make for 



LOWELL 229 

beauty and elevation, are too often wanting. Tn these things 
the great English humorists of his century, Lamb and De 
Quincey, are both his superiors. 

Somewhat similar defects attach to the substance of his 
essays. The discursive essays, those that pretend to little beyond 
entertainment^ make some of the most delightful reading in 
modern letters. It is impossible to resist their varied charms, 
all going back to the author's magnetic personalit3^ And 
much the same is true of the more serious essays. But these 
latter suffer in their lack of ceutrality, of a guiding principle and 
a definite purpose. Lowell's best poetry came of profound con- 
victions ; but when later in life he turned to the writing of 
prose, he was not inspired by the same sort of convictions — he 
wrote as a professional journalist, rather because he found 
that he could than because he felt that he must. Onty perhaps, 
in one or two addresses of his last years, like Democracy , is it 
possible to discern behind the written or spoken utterance the 
kind of consecration that has lifted into such clear light the 
names of Carlj^le, Emerson, Ruskin, and Arnold. His criticism 
at its best is constantly in danger of degenerating into witti- 
cism; at its worst it is unsympathetic and unsound, as when it 
confronts certain pet aversions like Petrarch, Swinburne, or 
Thoreau. 

To quarrel with the method, however, is not to condemn the 
man. Lowell rarely professes to set up standards — he will 
not sink the poet in the critic. If we will accept him 
for what he is, a kind of eighteenth century critic fortified 
with nineteenth century learning, browsing in the fields of 
literature when and where he pleases, resolved to like with a 
zest and to dislike with a zest, and even to trample under foot 
what is not to his taste, we shall get our profit from him. His 
insight always keeps pace with his sympathy. A late writer 
on style, Mr. Walter Raleigh, has said: "The main business 



230 KATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

of criticism, after all, is not to legislate, but to raise the dead." 
Just so far as this is true, Lowell is a great critic. The writers 
whom he loves he makes live again. Taken all iu all, there- 
fore, as critic and as poet, we know prett}' clearl}' how to esti- 
mate him. — not, perhaps, as our greatest scholar, certainly not 
as our greatest man of letters, but as our best example of the 
two combined. Or if Longfellow and Holmes be allowed to 
share in this pre-eminence, we m.ixy yet add to Lowell's credit a 
devotion to national and moral principles like that of Whittier, 
which joins to the breadth of his character a depth the}' can 
scarcely claim. 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, lSOO-1894 

Oliver Wendell Holmes was another native of Cambridge, 
who, however, opened his eyes upon the beauty of its elms 
nearly ten years before Lowell. He was born in the prolific first 

decade of the century, — in the year 1809, made 
Nativity. memorable on both sides of the Atlantic by the 

births of Lincoln, Poe, Tennj'son, Darwin, and 
Gladstone. His grandfather was a captain in the ' ' Old French 
War" and a surgeon in the Revolutionary army. His father, 
Abiel Holmes, was a Congregational minister at Cambridge 
and an author in a modest way. On his mother's side — the 
Wendells — he was of Dutch descent. On this side, too, he 
counted among his ancestors that "tenth Muse" who sprang 
up in America nearl}' two centuries before, Mistress Anne 
Bradstreet; but as she was onl}' one of his sixty-four great- 
great-great-great-grandparents, the Bradstreet poetry that 
flowed in his veins, thin to begin with, must have been 
but the weakest trace — a homeopathic high-dilution that 
the Doctor, with all his faith in heredity, would probably 
have laughed to scorn. 

There is almost nothing of note to be recorded of his boy- 



HOLMES 231 

hood, nor indeed of any period of bis life. He was brought 
up very simply in the old gambrel-roofed house, half 
Youth and parsonage, half farmhouse, described in The Poet 
at the Breakfast Ta6?e; heard the rustic Yankee 
dialect used by the hired "help" of the family— "nater" for 
nature, "haowsen" for houses, and " musicianers " for musi- 
cians; read the New England Primer^ Pilgrim^ s Progress^ Pope's 
Homer, and such poems of Gray, Cowper, Bryant, Drake, etc. , 
as were to be found in school books; showed some in- 
genuity in working with tools; went to a "dame's school " first, 
and then to Phillips Academy at Andover (see The School-Boy)^ 
whence he should have become a minister like his father but 
did not; and finally to Harvard, where he was undecided whether 
to look toward "law or physick," but very decided that author- 
ship was not suited to that particular meridian. The class of 
'29, in which he graduated, while not to be compared for liter- 
ary genius with the Bowdoin class of '25, was one of Harvard's 
most famous classes. James Freeman Clarke, over whom 
Holmes was chosen class poet, was one of its members, and 
the future author of America was another — the youngster 
whom "fate tried to conceal by naming him Smith." The 
class not long after began to hold annual dinners, and Holmes 
was regularly called upon to furnish an ode for the occasion. 
It was on the thirtieth anniversary that he wrote and recited 
the familiar poem, ' ' Has there any old fellow got mixed with 
the boys." After graduation he studied law for a while and 
then turned to medicine and surgery — a choice which made it 
advisable for him to spend some time in the hospitals of 
Europe. He accordingly passed two years in study at Paris, 
travelling a little about Europe during vacations. The year 1836 
found him equipped with his doctor's degree and established in an 
office at Boston. Two years later he received an appointment 
to the Professorship of Anatomy at Dartmouth College, and he 



232 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

lectured there for several terms. In 1840 he married. In 
1847 he was appointed Professor of An atom}' and Ph3'siology 
in the Harvard Medical School, and he remained on the Har- 
vard Faculty for thirty-five years. As he gave instruction also in 
microscopy and ps3'chology he used to sslj that he occupied, 
not a professor's chair, but a whole settee. In these duties he 
found his life work, less as a practitioner than as an investigator, 
teacher, and writer in his chosen profession. Some of his 
contributions to medical science were of the highest value, 
one in particular establishing the contagious character of a 
certain fever. 

Until the launching of the Atlantic MontliJy. well after 
the middle of the century, literature played but a minor 
part in Holmes's life. He delivered a course of lectures on 
the English poets before the Lowell Institute, and 
Early Verse, he also went out Occasionally, like Emerson and 
Lowell, on the Lyceum platform. In his college 
days he had written verses for girls' albums, and he had been 
class poet; but it was only in the j'ear after his graduation, 
when he was asked by the undergraduates to contribute to a 
college paper, that his verses went into type, and then, he 
says, he had his first attack of "lead-poisoning." It was in 
September of that year, 1830, that he chanced to read in a 
newspaper of the proposal of the Navy Department to disman- 
tle the frigate Constitution, which had done such good service 
in 1812, but which was then lying, old and unseaworth}', in 
the navy yard at Charleston. He wrote at once with a lead- 
pencil on a scrap of paper the stirring and indignant stanzas. 
Old Ironsides, and sent them to the Boston Daily Advertiser. 
They were copied in all the papers of the country, and the 
feeling aroused was so strong that the Secretary of the Nav}', 
who of course had been guilty of nothing but a want of senti- 
ment, allowed the "tattered ensign " to remain and the frig- 



HOLMES 233 

ate was converted into a school-ship. And thus Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, a meek-minded, modest-mannered, under- 
sized law student just turned twenty-one, became measurably 
noted as a poet. Six years later, when he began his medical prac- 
tice in Boston, he published a small volume of verse, containing 
of course Old Ironsides, together with a few such ever-delightful 
poems as The Dilemma and J/?/ Aunt, and best of all. The Last 
Leaf. This was the year of Emerson's Nature, the year be- 
fore Hawthorne's Twice- T<dd Tales, and three years before 
Longfellow's Voices of the Night. From this time on the 
poetic record was a slight but steady one. Every year brought 
its occasions and inspiration for verse, and every decade, more 
or less, found the verse gathered into a volume, which was 
treasured by the Doctor's many friends and plundered freely 
by school-readers for the sake of declaiming school children 
all over the land. If this was fame, the name of Holmes 
already belonged on the roll of American men of letters. 

But Holmes, while he had a genuine gift of song, was no 

such persistent singer as Longfellow, and no such poet by 

native compulsion as Brj'ant, Poe, and Whittier, and so he 

reached almost the age of fifty without feel- 

^^ The Breakfast' ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ particular claim on the read- 

ing public, or the reading public on him. Then, in 
1857, came the publisher's dinner described some pages 
back, and the resulting Atlantic Monthly, which he had the 
good fortune to name. Lowell would accept the editorship of 
the magazine only on condition that Holmes would contribute, 

and the result was The Autocrat of the Breakfast Tahle papers 

papers that did more than any other one thing to establish the 
high character of the magazine and to assure its success. He 
was before the public in a new role, and one in which he never 
afterward lost favor, no matter how often he assumed it. It 
is rarely that talk, of the breakfast table or whatever kind 



234 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

looks well on paper. Man}^ an eloquent speaker, and many a 
brilliant converser, has taken up the pen in vain. Dr. Holmes 
was a really brilliant and witty talker. He was a member of 
the famous Saturday Club, which still exists, and which, 
whether it grew out of that publisher's dinner or whether it 
originated with Emerson and several admirers who occasionally 
dined together at the Parker House, became a fixed feature of 
Boston literary life in the early days of the Atlantic and gath- 
ered into its coterie almost the whole galaxy of New England 
wit, learning, and genius. Of this galaxy the bright particu- 
lar stars were Lowell and Holmes, and Holmes doubtless 
shone with the rarer lustre. The club became the centre of his 
social existence, one of the fixed joys of his life, and without 
him it would have been deprived of one of its best excuses for 
being. Now, the kind of talk in which he delighted there and 
of which he showed himself so easily master, he succeeded in 
transferring, almost without loss, to paper. To be admitted 
to the presence of such a talker as he was, was the chance of 
a lifetime, and readers of the Autocrat became suddenly 
aware that this chance had come, as it were, to their doors. 

''Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table 
or elsewhere? — No, that is the last thing 1 would do. I will tell 
you my rule. Talk about those subjects you have had long in your 
mind, and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied 
but recently. Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till 
they are seasoned. . . . 

" What do I mean by the real talkers? — Why, the people with 
iresh ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them 
in. Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to 
thoughts about facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the 
finger on the key and the man of facts asserts his true dignity. I 
have known three of these men of facts, at least, who were always 
formidable, — and one of them was tyrannical. ' 

"Yes, a man somethnes makes a grand appearance on a particu- 
lar occasion, but these men knew something about almost every- 



HOLMES 2S5 

thing, and never made mistakes. — He? Veneers in first-rate style. 
The maliogany scales off now and then in si)ots, and then you see 
the cheap light stuff.— I found very fine in conversational infor- 
mation, the other day, when we were in company. The talk ran 
upon mountains. He was wonderfully well acquainted with the lead- 
ing facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and the Appalachians; he 
had nothing in particular to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and various 
other mountains that were mentioned. By and by some Revolution- 
ary anecdote came up, and he showed singular familiarity with the 
lives of the Adamses, and gave many details relating to Major Andre. 
A point of Natural History being suggested, he gave an excellent ac- 
count of the air-bladder of fishes. He was very full upon the subject 
of agriculture, but retired from the conversation when horticulture 
was introduced in the discussion. So he seemed well acquainted 
with the geology of anthracite, but did not pretend to know anything 
of other kinds of coal. There was something so odd about the extent 
and limitations of his knowledge, that I suspected all at once what 
might be the meaning of it, and waited till I got an opportunity. 
— Have you seen the ' New American Cyclopaedia ? ' said I. — I 
have, he replied; I received an early copy. — How far does it go? — He 
turned red, and answered, — To Araguay. — Oh, said I to myself, — not 
quite so far as Ararat; — that is the reason he knew nothing about it; 
but he must have read all the rest straight through, and, if he can 
remember what is in this volume until he has read all those that are 
to come, he will know more than I ever thought he would." 

But here, too, as in the case of Lowell's essays, it is prac- 
tically impossible to give by quotation any fair idea of the 
work. It is not simply that there is an embarrassment of 
riches, tempting one to quote from whatever page he may 
open, but that a good part of the charm lies in the endless variety 
of the matter, a quality which cannot be exhibited in an extract. 
The author turns lightly from subject to subject, always suggest- 
ing something new or illuminating something old, and touching 
each as he passes with his humor or his pathos. Perhaps 
George William Curtis has best described it — "the restless 
hovering of that brilliant talk over every topic, fancy, feeling, 
fact; a humming-bird sipping the one honej^ed drop from 



236 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

every flower." The humor is as unfailing as Lowell's and is 
generally of a finer quality. Poetry, too, was not barred 
from his scheme, and many of his best poems are to be found 
interspersed among the pages of The Autocrat. One is The 
Deacon's Masterpiece, the tale of the wonderful "one-hoss 
shay;" another is the allegory of The Ghamhered Nautihis, 
which was Dr. Holmes's own favorite among his poems — a 
notable poem, indeed, in every respect, in beauty of imagery, 
in construction, and in the lyric sweep and lofty aspiration 
of its often quoted final stanza, — 

''Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 

As the swift seasons roll ! 

Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by Life's unresting sea ! " 

The Autocrat had once declared that he thought himself 
** fortunate in having the Poet and the Professor for intimates;" 
and in good time the Poet and the Professor were allowed to ap- 
pear. The Professor at the Breakfast Table began quaintly 
enough: " The question is whether there is anything left for 
me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively 
friend (the Autocrat) has had his straw in the bung-hole of 
the universe." But creation is pretty extensive, and so seemed 
to be Dr. Holmes's ability to draw on its stores. This was in 
1859. Thirteen years later the Poet took his seat at the break- 
fast table, and still the universe showed no signs of being 
sucked dry. The second and third tappings lacked a little of the 
pristine flavor, that was all. The Professor, for example, was a 
trifle grave and over-given to theological discussions ; yet the 
pathetic death-scene of the Little G-entleman in that series is 
one of Holmes's finest passages. 



HOLMES 237 

Running through the Autocrat papers was a very slender 

thread of romance which bound them into a kind of unity. It 

was natural then that Holmes, having discovered his 

R07TI(ZTIC€S 

power and facility in prose, should enter the high- 
est field of prose art by attempting romance proper. Elsie 
Venner was published in 1861, The Guardian Angel in 1867, 
and A Mortal Antipathy in 1885. These stories are commonly 
called novels, but notwithstanding their elaborate character 
studies and their realistic details they contain so much of mys- 
tery approaching the supernatural that they are rather to be classi- 
fied as romances. Dr. Holmes had a deep interest in the prob- 
lems of inherited characteristics — an interest which sometimes 
came out in his poems, as in the dainty Dorothy Q. — and he made 
this largely the foundation of his romances. But the scientist' s, 
and, it should be added, the moralist's interest in the analysis 
of problems interfered sadl}^ with the romancer's art. Yet books 
that are so filled with Dr. Holmes's personality, no one can 
call failures. The Guardian Angel, indeed, is one of the 
books that no one who begins will lay aside, and it is not un- 
likely to be taken up for a second reading. Elsie Venner, the 
story of the girl of the serpent charms, cannot be accounted 
so successful, though it has a profound spiritual significance 
and it has been more widely read. 

Holmes's intellect remained bright and his pen was kept 
active into extreme old age. He wrote memoirs of Motley and of 

Emerson, medical essays, literary essays, and poems. 
'^^fj^,^ He made a second visit to Europe, with his daughter, 

in 1886, when he was honored with the doctor's de- 
gree by the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edin- 
burgh. The story of the visit was written out in Our Hundred 
Days in Europe. In 1890 he published his last volume. Over 
the Tea- Cups, another work somewhat in the vein of the 
Breakfast Table Series. In the meantime he had continued to 



238 NATIONAL LIFE AXD CULTURE 

write those poems which, from 1S51 onward, he had written 
every year for the meeting of the chiss of '29. Toward the end, 
as the circle became smaller and smaller, the poems and even 
their titles grew most pathetic: Before the Curfew (1882), 
A Lovinrj-Cup Song (1883), The Girdle of Frundship (1834), 
The Lyre of Anacreon (1885), The Old Tune, Thirty-sixth 
Variation, (1886), The Broken Circle (1837), The Angd Thief 
(1888), Aftcrthe Curfew (1889). ' After the Curfew, " wrote Sam- 
uel May to F. J. (xarrison. '-was positively the last. -Fare- 
well I I let the curtain fall. ' The curtain never rose again 
for '29. We met 'once more — a year later — at Parkers. But 
three were present, Smith. Holmes, and myself. Xo poem 
— very quiet — something very like tears. The following meet- 
ings — all at Dr. H. 's house — were quiet, social, talk in g jneet- 
ings. . . . At one of these meetings four were present, 
all the sunivors but one: and there was more general talk. 
But never another Class Poem."' The class-mates were nearly 
all gone. Gone, too, were his literaiy co-workers. Longfellow. 
Emerson, Lowell, and Whittier. Holmes had actually lived 

to be 

"The last leaf upon the tree." 

He died October the seventh. 189-1. 

• • Rhymes of an Hour " is the title Dr. Holmes once gave to a 

little gi'oup of his poems. The title was not given with any 

false assumption of modesty: it was a real charac- 

A Writer or terization of what he knew to be trivial and transi- 

Oe<;a.nonal 

and Humorous torv verse. On every public or semi-public occasion 
Verse. which could be enlivened or dignified by a special 

poem, and there were very many such in and about Boston, 
Dr. Holmes was likely to be asked to furnish the poem. Such 
a position is a trying one at best, but one. fortunately, to which 
onlv men with some sense of humor are often called. The 
Doctor rarely refused to respond : so that nearly one-half of his 



HOLMES 239 

verse is of this occasional character. He knew very well that 
the verse was not "booked for immortality." He allowed it 
to stand in his collected works along with a good deal of youth- 
ful nonsense, like The Spectre P'lg^ which a poet who took him- 
self more seriously would, out of jealousy for his fame, have 
suppressed. Yet to be able to write good occasional verse is a 
rare accomplishment, even if not a very high one. Our poets 
who have tried to write odes for great and serious occasions, 
centennial and the like, have seldom succeeded, the chief ex- 
ceptions being Emerson' s Concord Hymn, which was modestly 
meant, and Lowell's Commemoration Ode, behind which there 
was deep personal feeling. In general. Holmes wrote for much 
lighter occasions, and it must be said that he succeeded. 
Whether it was Brj^ant's seventieth birthday, or Longfellow's 
departure for Europe, or a dinner to G-eneral G-rant, or the 
dedication of a monument, or the founding of a hospital, the 
poem was freely given and was sure to be worthy of the occasion. 
Sometimes it rose to real distinction. The series of over forty 
poems written for the reunions of his class becomes impressive 
in its length and modulation — one song, as it were, in many 
keys. At the Saturday Club gives us the finest pictures we shall 
ever get of the real Longfellow, Agassiz, Hawthorne, and Em- 
erson, as they were among their associates. Horace wrote oc- 
casional poems that are immortal: Holmes, once or twice, 
came near it. 

Light verse was clearly his forte. His frankly humorous 
poems, like The Deacon's Masterpiece, Parson TareJVs Legacy, 
and How the Old Horse Won the Bet, have always held a high 
place. In the so-called society verse, that professedly trivial 
verse on trivial subjects, which demands such a light touch 
and which yet runs often close to seriousness, he has had no 
competitor in America unless it be Mr. Aldrich, and only one 
forerunner — the almost forgotten Philip Freneau. Poems of 



240 XATIOXAL LIFE AXD CULTURE 

tMs class are The First Fan, La Grisette, Our Yankee Girh, 
The Dilemma, Mi/ Aunt, and that playfully reverent poem on 
an old portrait of one of his Quincy ancestors in her girl- 
hood — Dorothy Q. 

A poet's final place, however, is most likely to be deter- 
mined by his serious work. Holmes's entirely serious work is 
not much in amount, and it includes no long poems. There 
are a few patriotic poems, but he left nothing better in this 
kind than the declamatory Old Ironsides. He 
A Genuine gtmck a surer note in the tender themes of Undrr 

Lyrist. 

the Violets and The Voiceless: the latter, indeed, has 
attained almost as wide a familiarity as any of Longfellow's 
lyrics : — 

**T7e count the broken lyres that rest 

"Where the sweet wailing singers slumber, 
But o'er their silent sister's breast 

The wild-flowers who will stoop to number ? 
A few can touch the magic string, 

And noisy Fame is proud to win them;— 
Alas for those that never sing, 

But die with all their music in them!" 

But surest of all in their hold on the future are The Last 
Lf-af vji(\. The Chambered Nautilus. Which is the greater, it 
is idle to ask. This distinction may be noted. The Cham- 
bered Nautilus, with all its lofty reach and perfect finish, is a 
meditative poem not materially different in character from 
half a hundred other famous lyrics in our language. On the 
other hand, The Last Leaf is like an instantaneous photogi'aph 
that has caught something never to be caught again. We 
prize it because it is a unique addition to literature, unlike 
anything save its imitations: — 

" I saw him once before, 
As he passed by the door, 



MINOR POETRY AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 241 

And again 
The pavement stones resound, 
As he totters o'er the ground 

With his cane." 

It is a picture only, a "silhouette" Mr. Stedman has happily 
called it, but the quaint staccato movement throws the picture 
into such sharp relief that it takes on the very attributes of 
life. 

Of his prose perhaps enough has been said. It was the 

prose that made Holmes distinctly a man of letters ; it was the 

prose that absorbed the best literary energies of his mature 

years and possibly kept him from producing any 

A Philosopher ^qq^:^^ masterpiece such as Whittier wrote in Snoio- 
m Disguise. ^ ^ 

Bound. But The Autocrat is masterpiece enough. 

At one time or another Holmes has been compared to most of 
the great writers of discursive prose in modern literature, and 
there is probably some measure of truth in each comparison. 
He remains peculiarly our own — even less than our own, almost 
to provincialism. Concentrated New Englandism, with only 
the Puritan element subtracted, is Dr. Holmes. But he be- 
longs to a company that is of many nationalities, a company 
of sage philosophers and shrewd humorists, who, under cover 
of giving amusement, afford unsuspected intellectual stimulus 
and add to the practical wisdom of their generation. 

MINOR POETRY AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 

As we approach our own time the distinction between major 
and minor men becomes more and more difficult to draw. The 
next generation may overturn our judgments. Even now, as 
we look back upon the nineteenth century, we seem to see 
Bryant, for instance, receding from the eminence which he 
once held into a position of chiefly historical importance. And 
we see Thoreau, for another instance, coming gradually into a 
wider acceptance, though still very far from holding a secure 



242 XATIONAL LIFE XSD CrXTTEE 

place among writers of the first order. Even more doubtful 
is the position of one for whom a special criticism must yet be 
reserved — Walt Whitman. But if names like these can be 
advanced to a conspicuous position only with caution, it seems 
pretty clear that such a position cannot be conceded to any of 
the many yet unnamed. At the same time it is to be remem- 
bered tliat a few. as Bayard Taylor in poetry and Hale 
and Curtis in prose, have done work that is not far below the 
enduiing kind. It is these and their fellow craftsmen that we 
must now endeavor to ^iew in such perspective as the criticism 
of forty years or less enables us to obtain. 

Among the poets of New England, as it happens, the dis- 
tinction between major and minor is sharply enough drawn. The 
men of real talent but of relatively weak poetic impulse seem to 
have been willing to resign the office of singing to 
w. w. story, Emerson and Whittier and the Cambridge group, 

1819-1S95. . r -, 1 

T. w. Parsori^.P^^i'sumg lor the most part other occupations. 
1519-1S92. William Wetmore Storv and Thomas William Par- 

G. E. Xorton. -, ^ r -, " -, • . 

1S27- sons, both oi whom were bom m the same year as 

Lowell, were examples of such men. They at 
least did their share toward sustaining the reputation which 
Boston has held since the time of Washington Allston, as a 
centre of literaiy scholarship and art. Story, a native of 
Salem and a gi'aduate of Harvard, spent only his early man- 
hood at Boston; the latter half of his life was passed at Home, 
where he devoted himself chiefly to sculpture. Among his 
works in sculpture are a statue of his father. Judge Story, and 
a bust of his friend. Lowell. Several of Lowell" s early essays 
were written in the form of letters addressed to • • My Dear 
Storg'' {i. €., Story). His writings include poems, a drama, a 
novel, and miscellaneous prose. Parsons was bom at Boston 
and spent most of his life there. A period of travel and 
studv in Italv resulted in his admirable rhvmed translation 



MINOR POETRY AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 243 

(1843, extended in 1867) of some cantos of Dante's Divine 
Comedy. His original poetry is grave and noble, and his 
Lines on a Bust of Dante take rank, with scholars at least, as 
an American classic. Professor Charles Eliot Norton, of Har- 
vard, though not a poet, may also be mentioned here as an 
associate of the Cambridge poets and himself a scholar and 
translator of Dante and an authority on art. 

To these may be added several writers of occasional poems. 
As far back as 1832, Samuel Francis Smith, a Boston 
clergyman and a classmate of Holmes, wrote America ("My 
Countr}^, 'tis of Thee"), in which patriotic and religious senti- 
ments combine to make a worthy national hymn. 
s. F. Smith, j^earlv thirty years later another hymn that has 

1808-1895. J J J J 

Julia Ward risen to the distinction of being called national 
Howe, 1819. ^^g written by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. She was 
a native of New York who at the time of her marriage took 
up her residence in Boston and wrote as a journalist there in 
the interest of the abolition of slavery and other reforms. 
Her Battle Hymn of the Repuhlic (1861) was inspired by 
seeing the troops in the camps near Washington marching 
to the song of John Brown s Body. Other poets who 
might here be mentioned — John (x. Saxe, for instance, the 
Vermont lawyer and humorist, or Lucy Larcom, the Massa- 
chusetts mill-girl and writer for young people— are fast being 
forgotten. 

Of the New England writers of prose, two or three who 
have outlived the century and with it most of their early asso- 
„ „ ^^ , ciates, are still rather to be regarded as belono-insr 

E. E. Hale, ' ^ & & 

1822- to the old school. One is Edward Everett Hale, 

T. w.Higgm- ^j^q Jq^ j^j^g \qi^^ career as a Boston clero-yman, has 

son, 1823- JO &j 7 

D. o. Mitchell, managed not only to identify himself with many 
1822- philanthropic projects but also to produce a 

large amount of miscellaneous writing — historical, fictitious, 



244- NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

moral, and discursive. His widely known patriotic tale, The 
Man Without a Country, was published in the Atlantic Monthly 
in 1863. Another veteran is Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 
also, in his early life, a Massachusetts clergyman. He was an 
ardent opponent of slavery and served in the war as colonel of 
the first colored regiment. His works comprise essays, bi- 
ographies, histories, poems, and romances. Yet a third is 
Donald Grant Mitchell, of Connecticut, who, under the name 
of "Ik Marvel," published Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) and 
Dream Life (1851). Th6se "contemplative views of life from 
the slippered ease of the chimney-corner " were among the most 
popular books of the middle of the century, but their tender 
vein of sentiment finds little place in an age of the scientific 
passion and "the strenuous life." All three of these men 
have of late published reminiscences — Dr. Hale in James Rus- 
sell Lowell and His Friends, Colonel Higginson in Old Cam- 
hridge, and Mr. Mitchell in American Lands and Letters — 
volumes that are peculiarly rich in anecdotes and other helps to 
the understanding of literary life and character in the East 
before and during the war. 

Comparable in many ways to this secondary New England 
group was a group of poets and prose writers whose work was 
done in the region that centres in New York and Philadelphia. 
There, however, the poets that followed immediately in the wake 
of the "Knickerbockers" mentioned in an earlier chapter rose 
to rather more prominence than the secondary poets of New 
England, for in this region there was no such overshadowing by 
great names, Poe having passed early from the stage and Bry- 
ant never having cultivated very actively his poetic gift. Four 
of these poets, of nearly the same age, were closely associated 
— Thomas Buchanan Bead, George Henry Boker, Bayard Tay- 
lor, and Bichard Henry Stoddard. 

Bead and Boker were chiefly identified with Philadelphia. 



MINOR POETHY AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 245 

The former was a painter of some note, and among his paintings 

are a portrait of Sheridan and his horse, and one of 

1822-1872. ' Longfellow's children. He published, from 1847 

G. H. Boker, onward, various volumes of poems, such as The 

1823-1890 

New Pastoral, sketches of emigrant life from mid- 
dle Pennsylvania to the Mississippi, and The Wagoner of the 
AUeghanies, a poem of Revolutionary days. He is best known, 
however, by the short poems, Sheridan's Ride, and Drifting 
("My soul to-day Is far away"). Boker was a dramatist, and 
virtually the only American writer of plays that have met with 
favor, both as literature and on the stage, since John Howard 
Payne, whose Brutus (1818) and many other plays were little 
more than adaptations. Boker's Calaynos (1848) and Francesca 
da Rimini (1856) are blank verse tragedies of a very respectable 
kind. Among his minor poems are Tlie Ballad of Sir John 
Franklin, The Black Regiment, and Dirge for a Soldier ("Close 
his eyes; his work is done! "). 

Easily chief of this group and demanding therefore a more 
extended consideration was Bayard Taylor, who has sometimes 

indeed been classed with our poets of the first 
foTr<f.r^^'''''order. He, too, was a Pennsylvanian, though 

most of his journalistic work was done in connec- 
tion with the papers of New York. He began life as a printer's 
apprentice with two ambitions — to travel and to become a poet. 
His first volume of poems appeared when he was but nine- 
teen; and in the same year (1844) he began his travels through 
Germany and other countries of Europe — on foot, partly be- 
cause he had not the means to go otherwise. His Views Afoot, a 
prose record of his experiences, published in 1846 with a pref- 
ace by Willis, fixed his reputation and entirely cleared his 
way to the desired life of travel and letters. He was among the 
gold diggings of California as corresponding editor of the New 
York Tribune, in 1849 ; returned through Mexico in 1850 ; and in 



246 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

1851 went again to Europe, penetrating thence south to Sudan and 
the White Nile and east to India, China, and Japan. Several 
years later he travelled through the north of Europe. During 
the Civil War he was made secretary of the legation to Rus- 
sia. He afterward visited many out-of-the-way places in 
Europe, including Iceland. In 1878 he was appointed United 
States Minister to Germany and died there in the same year. 
"He travelled pen in his hand," said his friend Boker; "he 
delivered course after course of lectures in the brief nightly 
pauses of his long winter journeys; he wrote novels, he wrote 
editorials, criticisms, letters, and miscellaneous articles for 
the magazines and the newspapers; he toiled as few men have 
toiled at any profession or for any end, and he wore himself 
out and perished prematurely of hard and sometimes bitter 
work." That, with all his accomplishment, he quite realized 
his literary ambition, would be too much to say. He had an 
exalted conception of the office of poet, believing that poe- 
try, or pure imaginative creation, was the highest goal 
toward which a man could strive, and he strove toward it with 
a heroism that compels admiration. Hence, perhaps, the fervent 
encomiums of his many friends. But his friends must often 
have felt, as he doubtless in time came to feel himself, that 
his work was without that final something imparted only by the 
genius which stands above both consecrated endeavor and noble 
ideals. If men like Emerson have had the blissful unconscious- 
ness of genius, men like Taylor have had the bitter conscious- 
ness of a want of genius. Yet Taylor became a poet and a 
writer of note ; in the days of his productiveness he had the 
warm admiration of many critical readers ; and he left 
to his credit a body of work of wide range and superior 
quality. His prose sketches go to swell the English liter- 
ature of travel that has been accumulating since the days of 
Sir John Mandeville. His dramas, written in his later years, 



MINOR POETRY AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 247 

— The Masque of the Gods, The Prophet, and Prince Deuhalion, 
— are the best specimens of the closet drama that America has 
produced, not excepting Longfellow's. Poems like Lars, a Pas- 
toral of Norway, the Gettysburg Ode, and the National Ode 
(read at the Centennial Exposition on Independence Day), are 
worthy achievements. And there are two or three short poems 
which have won a wide popular approval, such as the Bedouin 
Song, or the Song of the Camp with its familiar close, — 

•'The bravest are the tenderest, 
The loving are the daring." 

Taylor, moreover, was one of that remarkable group of American 
translators — Bryant, Longfellow, Taylor, Cranch, Parsons, and 
Norton — who between 1867 and 1872 gave us translations of 
the great poems of Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Groethe. Taylor's 
version of the two parts of Groethe's Faust, in the metres of the 
original, was published in 1871-72. It is perhaps enough to 
say of this that it is the standard English translation of Faust, 
and it seems likely that Taylor's fame in the future will rest 
more securely upon it than upon his original work. 

Richard Henry Stoddard is the fourth, and the last to sur- 
vive, of this group of poets. He was born in Massachusetts, 

but went to New York in boyhood, where he got 
R.H.stoddard,^:^^ education in the public schools, and, in the in- 

tervals of work in an iron foundry, read poetry with 
avidity. Later in life he became an editor, and worked in 
more or less intimacy with Read, Boker, and Taylor, and the 
somewhat younger Edmund Clarence Stedman. His earliest 
poems were published in 1849; volumes of more note were 
Songs of Sumvfier, 1856, The King^s Bell, 1862, and The Book 
of the East, 1871. The last is rich in oriental coloring. Stod- 
dard has never been a "popular" poet, but has been known to 
all critical lovers of poetry as a writer whose calling is high and 
whose instincts are sure. Like the English Landor, he has united 



248 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTrRE 

in his touch rare delicacy and strength. The former quality is 
most apparent in such a work, very Grreek inspirit, as The Fisher 
and Charon^ and in many a dainty lyric like The Divan and the 
imaginatiTe Persian Songs and Tartar Songs; the latter, in his 
stately hymns and odes — Abraham Lincoln^ Hymn to the Sea, 
and The Dead Master. The last poem, written in memory of 
Bryant, whom Stoddard greatly admired, contains much of 
the severe majesty of Bryant's best blank verse. 

New York had still her song- writers, too, though none so 
worthy even as the earlier Payne, Wood worth, and Morris. The 
Gary sisters, originally from Ohio, published various volumes, 

largely of verse marked by grace, melody, and 
TndsZlgT' I'eligious sentiment. Alice (1820-1871) was the 

more prolific writer; Phoebe (1824-1871) was the 
author of the widely known hymn, Nea rer Home. Stephen Collins 
Foster (1826-1864), who was born at Pittsburg, was a music com- 
poser and the author of a large number of idealized negro 
melodies. His Old Folks at Home {^^ The Suwanee Biver"), 
My Old Kentucky Home, Nellie Was a Lady, Massa s in the 
Cold Ground, etc., have passed into universal currency and 
almost take rank with folk-songs. * Minor balladists elsewhere 
were Thomas Dunn English (1819- ) of Philadelphia, author 
of Ben Bolt, and Coates Kinney (1826- ) of Cincinnati, 
author of The Rain upon the Roof. 

Prose writers who managed to struggle clear of the distrac- 
tions that beset a commercial and cosmopolitan community, it 
is not easy to find in New York and vicinity after the early 
part of the century. Irving and Cooper had no worthy suc- 
cessors. Even the poets, from Bryant and Poe down to "Willis 
and Taylor, suffered from the strenuous journalism, political 

*The authorship of the genuine negro folk-songs and hymns, like Roll, Jor- 
dan^ Roll, s-ud Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, is of course untraceable. Dixie was 
composed in 1859 by Daniel D. Emmett, who was born in Ohio (1814) of Southern 
parents. 



MINOR POETRY AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 249 

and other, into which they found themselves plunged; and 
into this journalism the writers of prose were one and all 
lured, so that the history of the prose of New York is mostly the 
history of her Danas and Ripleys and Greeleys. These were 
able and even scholarly men, but their work passed, usually 
with the day's paper for which it was done. A little more 
enduring is the work of those who had the larger leisure of the 
weekly or monthly magazine. But the very best of the New 
York magazines, though they have contributed much to science, 
art, and general culture, have never represented quite the same 
high literary standard as the Atlantic Monthly. And among 
their editors and contributors there was no Lowell or Holmes, 
but only a Holland, a Curtis, and a Warner. Even these 
three, it must be noted, like Dana, Ripley, Grreeley, and 
Bryant himself, were natives of New England and did much 
of their best literary work there. 

Josiah Gilbert Holland, after trying both teaching and 
medicine, set out upon a literary career at Springfield, Massa- 
chusetts, where he joined the staff of the Springfield Repuhli- 

can. He won his early fame there through his 
f^^^^g^j"'''''^' " Timothy Titcomb" Letters to Young People 

(collected in 1858) — wholesome social essays of the 
sermonizing type, very popular in their day, and always worth 
reading, though never quite demanding to be read. He fol- 
lowed up this popularity with an equally popular poem, Bitter- 
Sweet (1858). The poem contained some pleasant pictures of New 
England life— a Thanksgi\'ing festival and the like — that an- 
ticipated the finer work of Whittier's Snoio-Bound,\)\\.t\.\iW on ii^ 
vogue, like the later Katlirina (1867), chiefly by its sentimental 
and rather melodramatic story. Dr. Holland was the author, 
too, of some little lyrics of a wide currency — Babyhood^ for in- 
stance, and Gradatim ("Heaven is not reached at a single 
bound"). In 1870 at New York he assisted in establishing Scrih- 



250 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

nei-'s Monthly, now The Century, and he was the efficient editor 
of that magazine until his death. He had written a Life of 
Lincoln in 1865; and in the latter portion of his career he 
essayed virtually the only form of literary composition he had 
left untried and produced several novels. Arthur Bonnicastle 
(1873), Sevenoaks (1875), etc., are good, readable stories of 
Yankee life, l)ut they bear too clearl}' the stamp of the pro- 
fessional man of letters and cannot be ranked with the similar 
novels of Mrs. Stowe or Dr. Holmes. 

If Holland in some ways suggests Whittier and Holmes, 

Greorge William Curtis suggests quite as readily Lowell. 

Curtis was not a poet, but he was a foremost representative of 

that class of industrious literary journalists who 

G. w. Curtis, QQjjj]3ijig private study with public service and who 

1824-1892. ^ J r 

have done so much to mould the character of our 
later national life. He was a native of Providence, Rhode 
Island, and was a student at Brook Farm at eighteen. A jour- 
ney through Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land, resulted in 
several highly colored volumes of travel^the JSfile Notes of a 
Howadji (1851), etc. His life thereafter was spent in jour- 
nalism at New York. He conducted for a long time the 
"Easy Chair" of Harper^ s Magazine and was editor of Har- 
per's Weeldy at the time of his death. He was interested in 
all wise reforms, — took part in the abolition movement, and 
later attained national fame for his resolute support of the 
cause of civil service reform. As a platform orator, he rose 
almost to the rank of Everett and Phillips, and he stands to us 
to-day more for his character as a man and an influential pub- 
lic citizen than as a writer. Yet his name is associated with 
some ^vell-remembered books. The literary flavor is most 
apparent in his early work — the volumes of trav^el noted 
above, certain essays of social satire, like The Potiphar Papers 
(1853), and the little sketch of Prue and 7(1856), which, with 



Minor poetry and miscellaneous prose 251 

its delicate sentiment and slender romance, has charmed two 
generations of readers. His later works were more directly 
the result of his contact with public life and public men. His 
addresses include, besides those like Party and Patronage on 
civil service reform, eulogies on Bryant, Phillips, and Lowell. 
Charles Dudley Warner remained more persistently in New 
England than Holland or Curtis, but his name was so long 
associated with the editorial department of Harper' s Monthly 
Magazine that he seems to be legitimately of 
CD. Warner, ^^^ ^ y^^.^^ ^^^^ ^^ Plainfield, Mass- 

1829-1900. ^ ^ ' 

achusetts, he went to Chicago before the war, prac- 
ticing law there for a time, and then settled down to an 
editorial career at Hartford, Connecticut. He did much 
" hack work " of the better kind. "The American Men of 
Letters Series," to which he contributed the biography of 
Irving, was prepared under his s^Jipervision, as was also a 
"Library of the World's Best Literature." He wrote several 
novels, and several books of travel not unlike Curtis's — My 
Winter on the Nile (1876), etc. But his most characteristic 
work is to be sought in his collections of essays, such as My 
Summer in a Garden (1870) and Bacldog Studies (1872). 
These have abundant humor and that undefinable charm of 
personality by which, with very little in the way of substance 
besides a mild social philosophy, some writers succeed in win- 
ning the affections of a large audience. Clean, gentle, and 
whole-souled, are the words to apply to Warner; and it seems 
eminently fitting that we should close this review of later New 
York prose with one who was, in his modest way, not unlike 
him with whom our study of the earlier prose began — Wash- 
ington Irving. 

The affiliations of Curtis and Warner, as of Hale and Hig- 
ginson, were distinctly enough with the old school to justify 
the classification of them that is here made, but it is to be 



252 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

noted that the date of Warner brings us fairly into the con- 
temporary period. And it would be easy in this place to make 
the transition to that group of writers, led by Stedman, Aldrich, 
and Howells, who have maintained the literary traditions of 
the East since the Civil "War. But one considerable figure 
remains; and it is through Walt Whitman after all, perhaps, 
that the transition to our later literature in its broadest and 
most characteristic aspects can best be made. 

WALT WHITMAN, 1819-1892 

It has been customary to regard Walt Whitman, the start- 
ling innovator and scorner of traditions, as belonging to the 
younger school of American writers, and any de- 
ch^^^T parture from that custom is not likely to pass un- 
challenged. Without troubling ourselves about his 
relation to culture, which, whatever Mr. Burroughs* may 
contend, is not very obvious, we may yet feel that he is, in 
manifold ways, sufficiently representative of the American 
national spirit to give him a place in this chapter. It is true, 
the uniqueness of the man puts him apart from the other wri- 
ters, and would so put him wherever he were placed. He 
seems to defy classification. The public has not yet made up 
its mind whether he was a poet or a prose writer, a philosopher 
or an ignoramus, a genius or a charlatan. But his position 
is becoming each day more clearly defined; and the undeniable 
conspicuousness, not to say eminence, of that position, to- 
gether with the nature of his message, which after all was not 
new but was only a more emphatic declaration of what was 
already in the prose of Emerson and the verse of Whittier and 
Lowell, gives ample warrant for putting him with the men of 
that elder period. Besides, there is a chronological warrant 
in the date of his birth, which is the same as that of Lowell's; 

* Whitman: A Study. By John Burroughs. 



WHITMAN 253 

and though he was much later than Lowell in coming to as- 
sured fame, his work was well begun before the war. 

The details of Whitman's life are of peculiar importance 

for the understanding of the man and his work. He was born 

May 31, 1819, at West Hills, thirty miles from 

The school ^^^ York city, on ''the fish-shaped" Long Island, 

oj Liije. 

which he loved to call by its Indian name of 
" Paumanok. " His ancestors were English and Dutch yeomen, 
with a slight Quaker strain ; three centuries of them, he tells 
us, concentrate on one sterile acre, the burial hill of the Whit- 
mans. His grandfather had farmed his lands after the man- 
ner of Southern planters, with the assistance of a dozen 
slaves. His father was a carpenter and builder. His mother — 
''my dearest mother," "a perfect mother," — was Louise Van 
Velsor, in her youth a healthy Dutch -American lass and a 
horseback rider only less daring than his paternal grandmother 
who had smoked a pipe and acted as overseer of the slaves. 
His formal schooling, which was elementary only, was ob- 
tained rather irregularly. Many days of his youth he spent 
in roaming over Long Island, lounging with the fishermen 
on the beach, talking to the salt-hay cutters in the mead- 
ows or the herdsmen in the hills, clam-digging in summer, 
hauling fat eels through the ice in winter. Later, when his 
father moved to Brooklyn, he often stole back to declaim 
Homer or Shakespeare to the sea-gulls and the surf. In 
Brooklyn he became a typesetter in a printing-office, reading 
between whiles the Arabian Nights and the Waverley Novels — 
later, too, Ossian, ^schylus, and Dante. He was particularly 
impressed with the busy tides of life surging between New 
York and Brooklyn, through the city streets and up and 
down the Sound. He had a passion for crowds, for haunting 
the ferries, the omnibuses, and the theatres. Thus he got to 
see most of the celebrated men and women of the time^- 



254 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

Jackson, Webster, Clay, Lafayette, Kossuth, Fanny Kemble, 
Halleck. Cooper. Bryant, Foe. For companions, apparently, 
he sought out the deck-hands and pilots on the boats, or the 
omnibus drivers, ''Broadwa}^ Jack,"' "Balky Bill," "Pop 
Rice," and the rest, bv whose side he would ride, listenino; 
to their yarns, or declaiming into the street-traffic some pas- 
sage, it might be, from Julius Caesar. 

In due time, after various experiences in carpentering and 

school-teaching, he became an editor. Then, in his thirtieth year, 

he set off with his brother on a long expedition 

Journalism through the middle states and down the Ohio and 
and Literature. ^ 

3Iississippi rivers, bringing up at New Orleans, 
where he remained for a time in newspaper work. Thence he 
worked his way back, up the Mississippi, by the Great Lakes 
and Canada, and down the Hudson, travellino- in all eight 
thousand miles, much of it afoot. Up to this time his journal- 
istic and literary work was of the ordinary ty^Q and had at- 
tracted no attention. He had begun to write at twelve years 
of age, and some of his pieces had appeared in Morris's Mir- 
ror. His chief editing was done for the Brooklyn Eagle. But 
after thirty he became conscious of a great desire growing 
within him, and to accomplish this desire he resolved to put 
aside, if need be, the ordinary pursuits of life and forego the 
ordinary rewards. So well as he could formulate it to himself, 
it was a desire to pat on record in some literary form an entire 
personality, a man with all his characteristics, sensual and 
spmtual, with his bodily sensations and appetites, and his men- 
tal and moral struggles, hopes, and di-eams. Moreover, that 
personality was to be portrayed in the midst of the tumultu- 
ous, free, expansive, democratic American life of the latter 
half of the nineteenth century. Long consideration convinced 
him that the only way in which he could do this successfully 
would be by portraying his own personality, which alone he 



WHITMAN 255 

knew, and which, from its environment and experiences, might 
fairly be regarded as the personality of an American schooled 
in the world both of nature and of men, robust, energetic, free, 
alert, tolerant, kind. 

In accordance with this design, which he seemed to regard 
as novel, he sought some new form of expression. He dis- 
carded both metre and rhyme, and, after much dif- 
'',^^"^'ff ^-^ ficulty, all stock poetic phrases, preserving still a 
poetic semblance by writing in long, uneven lines 
marked with a rude rhythm. He abandoned the name Walter 
for Walt, and "stood" for his picture with his hat on one 
side of his head, beard rough, blouse open at the throat, one 
hand on his hip and one in his trousers pocket. Yet the 
picture, as it may be seen in his volume, is not defiant, is even 
winningly modest in facial expression, betokening a character 
of frankness and simplicity; and Whitman exemplified his 
democratic simplicity by setting up the type for the first 
edition of his poems (1855) with his own hands. Leaves of 
Grass he named the volume, perhaps in symbol of the lowly, 
teeming, equality-loving democracy which it was his purpose 
to sing. 

" One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person, 
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. 

" Of physiology from top to toe I sing, 
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for 

the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, 
The Female equally with the Male I sing. 

*' Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, 

Cheerful, for freest action- form' d under the laws divine, 
The Modern Man I sing." 

The audacity of the thing challenged attention, but it was 
not likely to win impartial criticism. The hedge-hog public 
played its spines, as usual, in the face of such unconvention- 



256 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTUEE 

ality, and the author became notorious if not yet famous. 
The book was condemned by general readers, and by many 
critics. And more than thirty years afterward, Whitman, 
within four years of death, could still complain that from a 
worldly point of view his book had been worse than a failure, 
that he had not gained the acceptance of his time, and that 
public criticism still showed ' ' marked anger and contempt 
more than anything else." Abuse, however, is a better stim- 
ulus than neglect; there must have been something to create 
such a stir. Besides, Whitman had, from the first, some 
loyal defenders. Emerson did not reject him, nor Carlyle. 
There were successive editions and enlargements of his work, 
and in 1868 a volume of selections from his poems was edited 
by W. M. Rossetti in England, where the author was readily 
accepted by men like Swinburne, Dowden, and Symonds. 

The remainder of Whitman's life contains an important 
episode. At the close of 1862 he learned that his brother 
G-eorge, an officer in the arm}^, had been wounded. He went 

„, ^ . to Virginia and became an army nurse, and from 

War Expert- ^ -^ ' 

ences and LateriYiQia. i\\\ ?dtQV the close of the war served faith- 
Life. fully in that capacity in the camps and hospitals 

about Washington. It was a fit heroic accompaniment to his 
heroic song, and it is almost incredible that he should have 
been dismissed shortly afterward from the Interior Depart- 
ment because an "official" disapproved of his Leaves of Grass. 
A vindication by an admirer, published under the title of 
" The Grood G-ray Poet," gave him an enduring sobriquet; and 
he was soon appointed to another clerkship. His literary work 
was not intermitted; the war experiences furnished him with 
some of the noblest passages of his poems as they now stand — 
thQ Drum- Taps and the Memories of President Lincoln; and he 
published his prose Democratic T7stosinl870. After a stroke of 
paralysis in 1873 — the culmination of physical ills brought on by 




"* <» 



■-^^ (I5r 





\VALX WHITMAN 
GEORGE WIULIAM CURTIS 



BAYARD TAYLOR 
SIDNEY LAJSTIER 



WHITMAN 257 

his hospital service — he retired to Camden, New Jersey, where 
he lived thenceforth, partly upon the generosity of his friends. 
His home became the resort of many visitors, who were always 
welcomed. He lectured occasionally, and he took a jaunt 
westward to the Rocky Mountains in the fall of 1879, but, like 
Thoreau and Whittier, never went abroad. He added sev- 
eral slender supplementary volumes of both prose and poetry — 
Novemher Boughs, 1888, and Good Bye, My Fancy, 1891. He 
designed and built his own tomb at Camden, where he died, 
March 26, 1892. 

It is still too earlj^ to calculate the orbit of an eccentric 
luminary like Whitman. But one thing we are certain of, 
that he fills a large place in the hearts of many 
His Prose. |overs of English poetry, and that he cannot be 
omitted from any final summary of American literature. To 
lose from our records such a virile, stimulating personality 
would be to suffer irremediable loss. Our estimation of the 
value of his work must grow with our closer acquaintance with 
it. It has been said that his prose is of little value, but 
though written, unfortunately, without any sense of style, 
it is of much value. The hospital scenes in his Speci- 
men Days are among the strongest documents left by the Civil 
War. Whitman continually declared that the real war would 
never get into the books; but one aspect of it, with all its 
horror and pathos and heroism, has fairly gotten into his book. 
It is an aspect, too, that most needs to get into the books in 
the interest of universal peace. His Democratic Vistas and his 
Backward Glance o'er TravelVd Roads are supplementary to 
his poems and almost indispensable to a right understanding of 
them. From these we learn that his poems, often seemingly 
incoherent cries — a "barbaric yawp" he called them, and the 
critics found it a good catchword, — had a definite purpose and 
were constructed on a carefully conceived plan; that, as 



258 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

stated above, they aimed to set forth the democracy of this 
new world and nation, with all its virtues and vices, its mean- 
ness and grandeur, and through it all, profiting by its very 
effacement of false distinctions, the sure evolution of the indi- 
vidual, — the realization of the divine personality, call it soul or 
what 3^ou will, that ever}^ man feels within him. 

Of course his poems, or chants, are the basis of his reputa- 
tion. In Leaves of Grass he left, as he quaintly expressed it, 
his carte-de-vislte to posterity. Nothing is easier than 
The Poetry and ^^ pick flaws in the book. In the eyes of some it is 

its Defects. ^ *^ 

one great flaw, a standing offence to the aesthetic 
sense. It is uncouth. It deliberately violates the rules of 
art, and unless we admit that our rules are idle we must admit 
its defects. We are struck by the strange vocabulary, the 
hybrid and foreign words that start up everywhere — imperturhe, 
aplomb, hahitan, Americanos, — though now and then a humor- 
ous intent saves the phrase, as when we read: "No dainty 
dolce affettuoso I." Even more striking is the peculiar, 
lawless rhythmic movement, not the easy rhythm of prose 
nor the regular metre of verse, but something between 
the two. It is true, we have been accustomed to the same 
thing in the lyric passages of the Old Testament and in Ossian. 
But the preference of the ear for the regular harmonies of 
verse is shown by the fondness with which readers cling to one 
of the two or three metrical and rhymed poems in the book, — 
Captain, My Captain. Indeed, it is not likely that symmetry 
of form, which has marked great poems from before the days 
of the Iliad, will ever be generally abandoned. Whitman chose 
to abandon it because he fancied that a greater freedom of 
form accorded with his theme. That Whitman would not have 
succeeded better with conventional forms is extremely prob- 
able, but the conviction remains that the final poem even of 
Democracy, if such ever comes, will be a product of higher art 
than his. 



WHITMAN 259 

A more serious defect of Leaves of Grass inheres in its 
substance and method. It is diffuse, prolix. This, too, Whit- 
man would say, is in accordance with the subject. Democracy 
is all-inclusive. American life is a great welter and chaos, 
and all this must go into the poem. But even chaos might be 
suggested without enumerating its particulars. The cunning 
painter knows how to put vast crowds into his canvas without 
painting all the individuals. Whitman insists on the particu- 
lars and makes no attempt at concentration. He complained 
of Emerson's books being all good sugar and butter. For him- 
self, he gives us plenty of coarse bread and even unmilled grain 
in the straw. 

" Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice! 
Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of the 
apple and the grape! " 

" I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, 
clack of sticks cooking my meals, . . . 
The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking 
engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color' d 
lights." 

There are many pages of this, — poetic and prose phrases 
jostling each other in hopeless confusion. Doubtless the 
impression made is that of ceaseless movement and end- 
less diversity, of tumultuousness and multitudinousness. But 
it is made at a great cost of time and nerves to the reader 
and with little cost to the writer. Much of what we are 
obliged to read is but the raw material of poetry which the 
writer has flung down before us without taking the pains to 
exercise his art upon it. 

Finall}^, the gravest charge against Leaves of Grass touches 
its frequent coarseness of theme and expression. Whitman 
would conceal nothing, and naturally, in his conscious revolt 
against a society that timidly conceals too much, he grew a 



260 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

little defiant in his plain-spokenness. This is perhaps the 
most that can be charged — he was needlessly gross. There 
was nothing morbid or vicious about it. His conception of 
society and the plan of his poem were in part his defence ; be- 
sides, he was so constituted that he could accept all levels 
and conditions of life on equal terms and feel no repulsion; 
nor could he understand why others should feel any. He could 
associate with the tramp, with the Indian, with the butcher 
boy in the shambles. He was ' ' no sentimentalist, no stander 
above men and women." "I think I could turn and live 
with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd. " He 
is the Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln type still fur- 
ther materialized; and inasmuch as we have admired the type 
and even proclaimed it to the world as American, we should 
do ill to repudiate Whitman. At the same time we may well 
remind ourselves that we have another type, one of refinement 
and spirituality, to set over against it — our Longfellows, 
Whittiers, Hawthornes, and Emersons. 

When we turn to praise of Whitman, our task seems equally 
easy. The charge of egotism (except in the technical, philo- 
sophical sense of the word) may be dismissed. We have seen 
how he came to put himself so conspicuously into 
His Aims. jj-g pQemg, It was not to parade himself as an ex- 
ceptional being, but rather as an " average man " — to hold the 
mirror up to other men and declare his kinship with them. 
There is no self-conceit about that. Moreover, looking back 
upon his work in his old age. Whitman was disposed to regard 
it very modestly and to admit frankly some of its shortcom- 
ings. He admitted that in pictorial and dramatic talent and 
in verbal melod}^ not only the great masters of poetry but 
many besides had transcended all that he had done or could 
do. In his youth he had accepted the challenge of science 
and democracy to idealize them; in his age he saw the magni- 



WHITMAN 261 

tilde of the attempt and wondered at his audacity. The whole 
thing was experimental, and the probabilities were that 
it was largely a failure. He had honestly tried to give 
this new America a new poem, worthy of its new ideals; 
granted that he had failed, it was something that he had 
gained a hearing and perhaps pointed the way for a future and 
more able bard. The projected song of the soul, to supple- 
ment his song of the body, he had not sung, or had sung only 
in hints and fragments. That greater task he was willing to 
leave for the future bard. Even what he had done was rough 
and inchoate. " I round and finish little, if anything." '' The 
word I myself put primarily is the word Suggestiveness. 
Another impetus-word is Comradeship. . . Other word- 
signs would be Good Cheer, Content, and Hope. " 

Because Whitman as an artist did not always distinguish 
between good and bad, pursuing a theory with the usual fatal 
results, is not sufficient reason for rejecting him. We do not 

reject Wordsworth. We can pass by the bad and 
lish ^*^^T c^w^ll upon the good. Taking Whitman simply at his 

own final valuation, we get much. The joys of 
free fellowship, the love of comrades, none has sung more 
heartily or worthily. And his courage and optimism are as deep 
as Emerson's. To the very last, beneath life's setting sun, he 
warbled (it is his own word) "unmitigated adoration." No 
one rises from his pages despondent. They breathe of life and 
health and boundless spaces out of doors. They quicken the 
pulse and enlarge the vision. He may have lacked the art of 
suggestion, the art which draws a portrait at a stroke, but 
there is no denying his claim to a profound suggestivenesSo 
He throws out hints and clews which the reader must follow 
for himself. His poems open upon vistas. Read When J 
Heard the Learned Astronomer^ or As I EhUd with the Ocean of 
Llfe^ or Tears^ or With Husky -Haughty Lips, Sea. Perhaps 



26^ NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

still better examples are to be found in his Passage to India or 
his Whispers of Heavenly Death, those later and lofty chants 
in which he was feeling his way toward the nobler, unwritten 
poem of man's immortal part. 

There may be doubt whether Whitman has given us any 
adequate song of democracy. He stands for the American spirit, 
but not as does Franklin, Lincoln, or Lowell. If we think of all 
that these men did and then of what Whitman did, the differ- 
ence is manifest. His office was somewhat like that of one who 
stands by and cheers while the procession goes on. It is true, 
he took a noble part through the Civil War — none nobler. But 
it was a humble part ; he did not sit in the seats of the mighty. 
He saw democracy from below only, whereas Franklin and 
the others saw it from both below and above. Yet one posi- 
tive accomplishment must be set to his credit. He became 
the truest laureate of the War, and of Lincoln, the idol of the 
people. His Drum- Taps give us the poetry of the great con- 
flict, as his camp and hospital sketches give us the prose. 
Beat! Beat! Drums! and Song of the Banner at Dayhreah are 
true poems in every sense of the word. The Memories of 
President Lincoln are as exalted as an elegy with such a great 
theme should be, yet as tender as the sincerest threnody born 
of personal grief. WJien Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom' d 
and Captain! My Captain! must endure with the fame of 
the ' ' martyr-chief. " 

*'0 Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, 
The ship has weather' d every rack, the prize we sought is won, 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people al 1 exulting, 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; 
But heart! heart! heart! 

O the bleeding drops of red, 
Where on the deck my Captain lies. 
Fallen cold and dead." 



WHITMAN 263 

Whitman's own opinion of the verbal melody of his poems 
(the regularity of the one just quoted is altogether exceptional) 
has already been cited. It must not be lightly assumed, how- 
ever, that there is no music in his verse. We are inclined to 
complain when a poem like The Vision of Sir Launfal yields 
less melody than its form promises ; on the other hand , we are 
delighted to find many of Whitman's poems yielding more 
melody than they promise. When his theme rises and his 
imagination and feeling rise with it, the words flow music- 
ally enough and the rhythm answers to the emotion. Listen 
to the bird song in Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking : — 

'' Winds blow south, or winds blow north, 
Day come white, or night come black. 
Home, or rivers and mountains from home, 
Singing ail time, minding no time. 
While we two keep together." 

Not to feel the simple melody of this, or the larger harmony — 
the soothing, wave-like lapse — of other passages in the same 
poem, the ample sweep of the Song of the Redwood Trec^ the 
majestic march of Pioneers! Pioneers^ the passionate pulse 
of Bent! Beat! Drums! — Blow ! Bugles! Blow! would argue one 
dull of sense indeed. 

But music and form are the last things Whitman would de- 
sire to have himself gauged by. He stands at the farthest 
remove from artist-poets like Poe, Longfellow, and Tennyson. 
He is more akin to Carlyle and Emerson — men of poetic insight 
careless about some of the minor poetic gifts. He did not 
write to please, but to arouse and uplift. "The true ques- 
tion to ask respecting a book, is, has it helped any human 
soul? " He explicitly declared that no one would get at his 
verses b}^ viewing them as a literary performance or as aim- 
ing mainly toward art or sestheticism. 

"Camerado, this is no book, ^ 
Who touches this touches a man." 



264 NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE 

As such, therefore, the book must go down to posterity, not a 
perfect song, rounded, complete, and detached, but a gtj, 
whether clear and strong or husky and broken, vibrant still 
with the feeling of the man who uttered it. 

Here it seems well to mark the conclusion of the first 
national period — the creative period — of our literature, though 
of course literature, like history itself, is continuous, and can 
have no real conclusion short of national extinction. From 
Brown and Irving to Lowell and Whitman the compass has 
travelled a pretty wide arc. At first timid in spirit, and bound 
more or less consciously to conventional, old-world forms, our 
literature gradually shook itself free and stood forth a native 
product, willing to be gauged by its inherent vitality and its 
unborrowed charms. It began to register faithfully, too, the 
various steps in our national progress — the merely material 
subjugation of the wilderness, the declaration of moral and 
intellectual independence that followed upon the declaration of 
political independence, the development of a worthy cis- 
Atlantic scholarship, the encouragement of science and the 
scientific spirit, and the final establishment of the great modern 
principle of human equality. The progress was one that 
looked always toward making "the bounds of freedom wider 
yet." And with Lincoln's emancipation proclamation on the 
political side, and, on the literary side, the vindication by 
Emerson, Whitman, and others of the inviolate rights of the 
individual, America's part in the foremost mission of the nine- 
teenth century seems to have been accomplished and the way 
cleared for new effort. 



PART III 

LATER ACTIVITY 

FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE PACIFIC 
1860-1900 



265 



Continuous thougli our literature was and is, a very per- 
ceptible change came over the character of it in the seventh 
decade of the nineteenth century. The Civil War troubled 
and retarded the current. The elder writers held on faithfully^ 
but, except in the cases of two or three — Lowell, rather 
younger than the rest, and Holmes, to whom was given a sec- 
ond youth, — there was naturally a falling off in the quality of 
their product, or they turned their attention to translation and 
other less original work. And the younger generation was slow 
to take their places. 

Of two reasons that may be assigned for this phenomenon, 
one has just been mentioned. The civil conflict, so long averted, 
but coming finally with such terrible and prolonged results, ab- 
sorbed the best energies and blood of the youth of the nation. 
Even the masses of the people who took no direct part in it were 
necessarily distracted by it, and the conditions of life were 
made harder. There was no leisure for art, and no demand 
for it — no surplus of wealth to support it. The latest birth- 
year of our great writers was that of Lowell and Whitman, 1819, 
or, to include Parkman, Curtis, and Taylor, that of Taylor, 
1825. Manifestl}^, those born later had not time to get fully 
settled into the literary way of life before the great struggle 
came; and the prohibitive conditions which it brought remained 
operative for many years. 

The other reason is scarcely a reason, — it is rather an ob- 
served fact. Literature, like other phenomena, seems to fol- 
low some law of rhythm. Great writers appear in groups, and 
a period of great achievement is followed by a period of lesser 
achievement or even barrenness. It was perhaps inevitable 

267 



268 AMEEICAN LITERATURE 

that the end of the nineteenth century should show no such 
literary record as the middle. The drift of the age, too, away 
from idealistic philosophy, toward a materialistic science and 
toward industrialism and commercialism, has tended to check 
artistic creation and assist this rhythmic ebb. Possibly we are 
wrong in fancying that there is any antagonism between science 
and poetry — at bottom there probably is not ; and possibly we 
fail to estimate rightly the artistic product of our times ; but 
the fact remains that, in our present judgment, not a single 
poet arose in the closing decades of the century who could 
compare with the least of the seven who filled the preceding 
decades with song; nor was there any writer of imaginative 
prose to compare with Poe and Hawthorne, nor any orator like 
Webster, nor any sage like Emerson. 

But the period has been far from barren. Criticism is ran- 
sacking all the records of the past; science is making new rec- 
ords; and journalism grows apace. Pens were never busier 
than now, and ephemeral as their product for the most part 
seems, the future will doubtless find in it something worthy to 
be preserved. Meanwhile, we observe that new notes have 
been sounded, both in verse and in prose, and though our 
judgment must be still cautious and apologetic, we feel 
assured that our literature is daily growing, if not deeper, yet 
broader and richer. We observe too, the wide geographical 
distribution of this later product. New England and the Mid- 
dle Atlantic States no longer hold a monopoly. The South was 
gathering strength in letters even at the outbreak of the war ; and 
since then, literature, after taking one great leap with the leap 
of settlement to the Pacific coast, has gradually spread over the 
country until now there is scarcely a considerable valley, plain, or 
mountain-side, south, west, north, or east, that has not its local 
writers and even its local tone. Indeed, among the new notes 
of our literature, this vogue of the provincial, this strong and 



LATER ACTIVITY 269 

endlessly varied local color, is so marked that it might almost 
give its name to the period. 

In grouping the writers of this period, therefore, a geograph- 
ical division is desirable. Except, too, for the motley later 
fiction, often too narrowly local to be classified, such a division 
will be found both easy and logical, since the writers of each 
large section of the country, with all their minor differences, be- 
tray common characteristics and tendencies. No classification, 
however, can be perfect; and especially in such a diverse and 
restless population as ours, one must be prepared to find writers 
who constantly overstep the bounds of their section and class. 
Walt Whitman, for instance, who might well have been the 
spokesman of a less aristocratic community, was of the East; 
and naturally a few tj^pes of all sections may be seen meeting 
on the common new ground of the West. But on the whole 
these sections, as reflected in literature, have kept remarkably 
distinct. 



CHAPTER YIII 

POETET IX THE SOUTH 

Before 1860, no literary impulse manifesting itself in work 
of high order was felt farther south than Richmond. The name 
of Poe, which Richmond may claim, is of course national, and 
more. But the names of Wilde of Georgia andSimms of South 
Carolina are considerably less. Such other names as might be 
mentioned are, properly, almost wholly forgotten. About I860, 
however, there were signs of an awakened activity, and though 
it was checked and thwarted by the disasters that speedily fol- 
lowed, it was never entirely repressed, and it finally resulted 
in a literature that no longer compared unfavorably with the 
contemporaneous literature of the North. 

So far as the South is concerned, the period from 1860 to 
1900 falls sharply into two parts. The first half, to be 
considered in this place, was marked by jooetic activity, 
but apparently brought forth not a single important work of 
prose. During the second half the activity in prose fiction was 
marked, while the years were singularly barren of poetr3\ All 
of the literature is in some sense retrospective. At least it has 
kept rather closely to the traditions of an earlier time. The 
poetry has been but a second flowering of that exuberant lyric- 
ism which distinguished the earlier writers from Wilde to Poe, 
while the prose fiction, often poetic in coloring, has but half 
adopted the methods of the later realists, reverting as it does 
by choice to the old South, and keeping mostly on the side of 
chivalry and romance. 

Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, the first in 

270 



HAYNE AND TIMROD 271 

time of the later poets, r^re properly remembered together. 

They were born at Charleston, South Carolina, with 
1830-1886. '^^t three weeks difference in their ages. They sat 
Henry Timrod, tosjether at school, and remained lif e-lonsj friends. 

Both had the friendly encouragement of the novel- 
ist Simms. Both served in the Confederate army, Hayne as a 
colonel, Timrod as a private and a war correspondent. Both 
suffered wreck of health and home in the devastating conflict, 
and both wrung from its turmoil inspiration to song. Hayne, 
who was a member of an old and wealthy Carolina family — a 
nephew of the Senator Haj^ne made famous by the great debate 
with Webster — was the more fortunate of the two in worldly 
circumstances and length of life. The war, however, left him 
in poverty, and he retired in his later years to the pine barrens 
near Augusta, Georgia, pursuing his chosen profession of writ- 
ing as a means of support. He had published a volume of 
poems as earl}' as 1855, and he was long regarded as the repre- 
sentative poet of the South, though both Timrod and Lanier 
have since come to share his honors. With much of the artist 
in his temperament, he excelled in sonnets, and in quiet land- 
scape poems picturing the warmth and softness of southern 
scenery. He w^^ote war Ijaics and ballads — Beyond the Po- 
tomac, Vickshurg, In Harbor, etc. — but they breathe little 
more of the Tyrtsean spirit than do Longfellow's. They are 
distinctly inferior to the stirring war ballads of several other- 
wise minor poets — Forceythe Willson, for example, by residence 
of Kentucky, or Dr. Francis 0. Ticknor of G-eorgia, whose 
poems Hayne edited, and who was the author of the striking 
Little Giffen of Tennessee, 

Timrod, perhaps, of all these writers, felt most keenly the 
blow that so injured the rising literature of the South. He 
published a volume of poems in 1860, which was well received; 
but the war, beginning shortly afterward, interfered with any 



272 POETRY IN THE SOUTH 

continuous effort and left him in the end to carry on a losing 
fight against poverty and consumption. The death of a child 
added to the bitterness of his last desolate j^ears. He died 
in 1867. His poems, numbering about eighty in all, were gath- 
ered and published in 1873, with a memoir by his friend 
Hayne, and there was a re-issue — a memorial edition— in 1899. 
Timrod was a more serious and spontaneous singer than Hayne, 
and somewhat less finished, though still of a fine artistic 
sense. Katie is an exquisite little idyl, with pictures like paint- 
ings on porcelain. Better known and more distinctly southern 
is The Cotton Boll, a poem veritably aglow with the dazzling sun- 
shine that lies over the snowy cotton fields, and sounding, in its 
deeper passages, a note of prayerful patriotism half Miltonic 
in fervor. His poems written in war time, few, but strong, 
passionate, and sincere, mark him as the real laureate of the 
Confederacy. Carolina and Ethnogenesis ('the birth of a na- 
tion ' ) are the utterances of a noble and fiery heart. Yet the 
word "peace" was always on his lips, and there is scarcely a 
poem that does not end with a peaceful vision or prayer, — 
which makes the tragedy of his life one of the inscrutable 
ironies of fate. 

Sidney Lanier, who began his work just about the time of 
Timrod's premature death, is the foremost singer that the South 

has given us since Poe; some critics, indeed, notably 
Sidney Lanier, ^^ Stedman, have been disposed to put him almost 

on a level with our great poets. His life, also, was 
broken and brief. Born at Macon, Greorgia, of Huguenot and 
Scotch ancestry, he was graduated from a G-eorgia college at 
the age of eighteen, and in the year] following, on the out- 
break of the war, enlisted in the Confederate army . He was in 
the battle of Seven Pines and in the Seven Days' Battle 
about Richmond, and spent five months in captivity in Point 
Lookout prison. Some of his war experiences went into 



LANIER 273 

his first book, Tiger Lilies, a hastily written novel pub- 
lished in 1867. After the war, with little but a brave 
wife and a brave heart, he began his fifteen years' strug- 
gle with consumption. When his health permitted, he taught, 
or played the flute in an orchestra at Baltimore. So passionately 
fond of music was he that he could scarcely decide between 
that and poetry in his choice of a profession, though the needs 
of his life were such as to leave little to the preferences of his 
taste. He did some irregular literary work of whatever nature 
came to hand. Through the influence of Bayard Taylor, 
whose acquaintance he had made and who was one of the first 
to appreciate his powers, he was brought into public notice by 
being chosen to write the Cantata for the opening of the Cen- 
tennial Exposition in 1876. In 1879 he was appointed a lec- 
turer on English literature at the Johns Hopkins University, 
Baltimore, and his prospects for leisure and a competence were 
at last brightening. Two years later he died. 

Lanier's prose includes, besides the youthful novel already 
mentioned, some working over of old chronicles and legends 
for juvenile readers — The Boy's Froissart, The Boy's King Ar- 
thur^ etc., — and two series of university lectures. The Sci- 
ence of English Verse, and The English Novel. The latter are 
valuable as stimulative pieces of criticism, but Lanier's prose 
would not alone make good his literary claims. These rest 
upon his poetry, of which a volume was published in 1876, 
and a complete volume posthumously. The bulk of it is not 
much greater than Timrod's, but it is in every way larger in 
conception and more finished in form. Lanier had definite 
and positive views of the relation of art to life — it might al- 
most be said that to him art was life. He invested it with the 
sacredness of religion, and everywhere through his verse may be 
seen an exaltation of the creative gift and a protest against 
the commercialism and materialism, the greed and insincerity, 



274 POETEY IN THE SOUTH 

that seemed to him to be the curses of our modern civilization 
and to put poetry, music, and all the means of aesthetic and 
spiritual enjoyment beyond our reach. These views, however, 
are not didactically set forth. On the contrary, there is little 
American verse more refined and airily imaginative than 
Lanier's, and none, except Poe's, more melodious. His 
poems are gospels even more in their form than in their 
substance. The Symphony is not only a glorification of art; 
it is itself a glorified example of art, in which the violins and the 
flute and the clarionet are made to speak almost in their own 
tones, complaining of the deadly blight of Trade, and singing 
the praises of the music-master, unselfish Love. Corn is the 
hymn of the higher life of culture. The Ballad of the Trees 
and the Master and The Marshes of Glynn are religion set to 
music. 

Lanier was a constant experimenter, and though he was per- 
mitted to accomplish little, he essayed much. The Revenge of 
Hamish, in which he went outside of America for a subject, as 
Timrod did in Katie, is a narrative poem in long swinging 
lines — a powerful, almost tear-compelling ballad. The Psalm 
of the West is an ambitious song of the New World and the 
American Republic, from the voyage of Columbus to the re- 
union of North and South. There are several good poems in 
the negro dialect; and there are some exquisite lyrics, of 
which perhaps the best are The Song of the Chattahoochee and 
Ecening Song. But the incomplete Hymns of the Marshes ^ 
upon which he worked feverishly almost to the hour of his 
death, indubitably reveal the poet at his highest and best. The 
pictures of the live oaks with their "little green leaves," 
of the glimmering marsh, "a limpid labyrinth of dreams," of 
the rising sun and the flooding sea, are all drawn by the hand 
of a master. It must be admitted, too, that even after Poe 
and Tennyson and Swinburne he has wrested new melodies 



LANIER 275 

from words. Yet we are often made to feel that in applying 
so cunningly his theories of "tone-color" and harmony he has 
been led too far from spontaneity and has substituted artificial 
conceits for the fresh imagery of inspiration. In his devotion 
to the two arts of music and verse, he has lost sight of the 
boundaries of each, and has tried to secure, with language, 
effects which should be attempted with music only. In spite, 
however, of partial and perhaps inevitable failure, we shall 
long remember him for his high ideals, for the religious and 
even heroic consecration of his life to art under most discour- 
aging conditions, and for the undeniable beauty of much that 
he left behind. 



CHAPTER IX 
PEOSE AND POETEY IN THE WEST 

Literature in the West — between the Ohio River, let us say, 
and the Pacific Ocean— has not followed the same course of 
development as in the South. It scarcely made a beginning 
until well after the Civil War; perhaps no book published in this 
region before 1867 is worth recording to-day. Moreover, it is 
different in character. Prose and poetry have from the outset 
existed side by side, with a perceptible leaning toward prose 
as the more natural form of expression. The prose which we 
shall find supplanting the poetry of the South is still in a 
measure poetic ; the poetry of the West often tends to employ 
the free and homely idioms of prose. The western literature 
in its entirety is a novel product, quite without traditions, as 
new as the surroundings and the society which it reflects. 
That which Walt Whitman expressly stood for — sheer democ- 
racy, the levelling of class distinctions and the uncompromis- 
ing assertion of the individual — finds here a natural emphasis. 
College men are very decidedly in the minority. Farming, 
mining, lumbering, trapping, scouting, at the highest journal- 
ism and local law or politics, furnished the education of the 
western pioneer. Many a western "man of letters" has 
ploughed corn, ' ' punched ' ' cattle, sluiced gold, or travelled 
about the country with a pedler's cart. Men of culture from 
the East found their way to the West, but not in sufficient 
numbers to change materially the character of its early litera- 
ture. Prestige was from the first disregarded, culture often 
held in scorn. It is manifest that a literature of this type 

276 



CLEMENS 277 

must be gauged by somewhat altered standards. Yet it seems 
not unlikely that it is precisely this which the future will 
select as the most vital and characteristic literary product of 
the close of the nineteenth century in the United States. 

One of the veterans of this western school, who, though 
long famous, has but lately been conceded the dignified posi- 
tion that is his due, is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, universally 
known as "Mark Twain." He was born in Missouri in 1835. 
Avoiding with considerable success even a common 
fs55- ^^^"^^"'^' school education, he got his first literary training, 
like Franklin, Taylor, Whitman, and Howells, at 
the printer's case. For a while he was a tramp printer and 
for a while a pilot on the Mississippi. In 1861 he went to 
Nevada, where he became an editor of the Virginia City 
Enterprise. He engaged in mining, too; and pushing still 
farther west, pursued both mining and newspaper work in Cal- 
ifornia. In 1866 he visited the Hawaiian Islands, and finding 
upon his return that his humorous sketches in the San Francisco 
newspapers had given him a local fame, he began lecturing. 
In 1867 he went east, published The Jumping Frog and Other 
Sketches, and then made the European tour which resulted in 
the book that won him a national fame. Innocents Abroad 
(1869). Since then he has pursued a steady literary career, 
and the names of his many books are so familiar as scarcely 
to require recording. He has also travelled and lectured 
extensively, especially of late years, successfully laboring, 
with a heroism that reminds one of Sir Walter Scott, to remove 
a debt incurred by the failure of a publishing house which he 
founded. His permanent home is now at Hartford, Connec- 
ticut. 

Mr. Clemens' s best works connect themselves directly with 
his early experiences in the West. Roughing It (1872), for 
example, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and Life on 



278 PROSE AXD POETEY IX THE ^VEST 

the Mississippi (1883). are chapters out of the very heart of 
that life to -which he had lived as closely as a man may live. 
This is their fii'st claim to excellence. Their second claim lies 
in the emphasis which they lay upon one of the most charac- 
teristic phases of that life, namely, its rough humor. Mark 
Twain, indeed, will always be known as a humorist. A single 
serious work, like his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 
cannot make against this estimate. He, more than any other 
one person, has given late American humor the distinctive 
name it enjoys. Unfortunately, this very qualit}', which 
insured his popularity, brought also for a time the severest 
criticism. The humor is a little coarse for the readers of an 
age that shrinks from Rabelais and Swift. It mio;ht have 
passed in the days of Irving; it was pretty sure to be challenged 
after the delicate wit of Lowell and Holmes. Moreover, it 
possesses some unpleasant American characteristics. Inno- 
cents Abroad, for example, has in it not a little of that irrever- 
ence which Americans often betray in the presence of sacred 
old world scenes and institutions. But there is always one 
thing in its favor. There is little torturing of the fancy, as 
in some of our minor humorists, to make every sentence yield 
a laugh. The humor is of the most genuine kind — spontaneous 
and irresistible. A man could not stand before the public so 
many years as Mark Twain has done, bearing the most difficult 
of reputations to sustain, if humor were not of his very essence. 
Besides, his humor has mostly a purpose beyond the flash of 
wit. Pure drollery carried Artemus Ward into a deserved rep- 
utation. But Twain goes beyond pure fooling. Even Inno- 
cents Abroad, by no means his best book, has served a good 
end by turning to ridicule the sham enthusiasm of the routine 
tourist and the innocence of the over-gullible. It is true. 
Twain likes to disclaim any such object. ' -Anybody who seeks 
a moral in this story," he said of Huckleberry Finn, •- will be 



HARTE 279 

shot." Nor are his stories ever very coherent, for construct- 
iveness is not among his gifts. But in general they have a 
perceptible drift, and the fun that enters into them is there 
not wholly for its own sake but because it is an organic part 
of the conception: it often sinks to a subordinate element or 
even disappears in the presence of a higher purpose, and the 
writer becomes in turn a storj-teller, a satirist, or a moralist. 

Finallj" — and it is perhaps on this that Twain's claim to 
serious consideration is best founded — he is a genuine creator 
of character. A national literature can scarcely deserve the 
name until it has created characters which are seen to typify 
in the largest and best sense national traits. American litera- 
ture has nothing to compare with the Greek Ulysses. Our 
national traits may be too many and diverse to be compre- 
hended in one person, and we may have to be content with here 
and there a Long Tom Coffin, a Hosea Biglow, a Jack Hamlin, 
a Silas Lapham, a Colonel Carter. Even thus, our literature 
seems poor in real characters. But among the most satisfying 
are to be reckoned those two incarnations of ' ' Young America " 
on the frontier, those heroes of the ' ' Odyssey of the Mississ- 
ippi," — Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. 

The story of Francis Bret Harte is somewhat similar in its 
main features to that of Mark Twain. Born at Albany, New 
York, in 1839, Harte went early to California, where he be- 
came successively engaged in teaching, mining, and 
Francis Bret writing. His Condensed Novels (1867) were first 

Harte, 1839- it, -, . rm /^ -i • ^ • r 1 . 1 . 1 , 

published m The Califorman, oi which journal he 
was editor. In 1868 he became editor of the newly founded 
Overland Monthly, and in it were published his famous story, 
The Luck of Roaring Camp, and several years later his equally 
famous poem. Plain Language from Trutlful James (otherwise 
known as TJie Heathen Chinee). Then, like Mark Twain, he 
followed his fame east, and after spending some years in the 



280 PROSE AND POETRY IN THE WEST 

consular service in G-ermany and Scotland, writing steadily in 
the meantime, he finally settled down at London where he still 
resides and still writes tales of the days of California before 
the Pacific Railway. East and West Poems (1871), Tales of the 
Argonauts (1875), Gabriel Conroy (1876), Snow- Bound at 
Eagle's (1886), and Colonel Starhottle's Client (1892), are a 
few of his more than forty published volumes. 

Mr. Harte has commonly been classed with the poets, and 
the striking originality and occasional beautj^ of his poems give 
him a deserved place in that category. But it is doubtful 
whether any but the one poem mentioned above will live as 
long as will his prose idyls of that wild western life, all of 
which he knew and a part of which he was. It cannot be said 
that his late work has sustained his early reputation; that was 
scarcely to be expected, since the novelty has worn oflt and the 
writer's memory grown dimmed by time and distance. But 
his early reputation was well won. He was our real pioneer 
in the field of the short story — the story of strong realism 
reinforced by local color and piquant dialect; and the best 
writers in this kind at the present day, among them Mr. Kip- 
ling, are deeply indebted to him. Certain things can easily be 
charged against his work. Dickens thought it subtle in char- 
acter delineation, but Dickens himself was scarcely subtle, and 
Harte' s method was not unlike Dickens's in its tendency to- 
ward grotesqueness. Moreover, there is in Harte an apparent 
distortion of moral perspective, an exaggeration of the value 
of two or three virtues, such as courage, sympathy, and sin- 
cerity, to the complete ignoring of others. But the portrayal 
is essentially true to the life portrayed— the mixed society of 
adventurers, gamblers, desperadoes, and "rough but honest" 
men and women. One feels as he reads that it was thus that 
John Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin and Miggles lived and 
thought. Harte, like Twain, declared that he abstained from 



MILLER 281 

any positive moral. He gave the bad with the good, though 
with the natural result that the good gains immensely by the 
juxtaposition. Indeed, one secret of his charm is the way in 
which his vivid pictures of vileness, dissoluteness, squalor, and 
misery are illuminated by deeds of the tenderest charity and 
the highest heroism. Tlte Outcasts of Poker Flat, Hoio Santa 
Clans- Came to Simpson^ s Bar, Tennessee s Partner, and a dozen 
more, bear testimony to this. The stories are related, too, with 
dramatic skill, and with full appreciation of their romantic 
and poetic setting. It is hard to review these scenes and 
characters of a bygone era, still so fresh and full of life, and 
not feel that Mr. Harte has done somewhat more than, as he 
modestly put it, merely gather the materials ' ' for an Iliad yet 
to be sung. " The Argonauts of forty-nine have had their bard. 
Aside from Bret Harte, whose fame, as just stated, is more 
likely to rest upon his prose than upon his verse, Joaquin Mil- 
ler, " the poet of the Sierras," stands out as the 
Joaquin Miller^ ^^^ most characteristic of the far West. His par- 

18il- ^ ^ 

ents named him Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, but he 
has preferred to rechristen himself with the name of a Mexi- 
can bandit, Joaquin Murietta, the subject of one of his poems. 
He has lived to the full the life of an adventurer and pioneer. 
He went from Indiana to Oregon when he was thirteen, worked 
in the California gold mines, and lived for a time with an 
Indian tribe. Later he studied law and became a judge in 
eastern Oregon. In 1870 he went to England, where he was 
warmly received as a new and picturesque poet out of the 
West. He published Songs of the Sierras in 1871, Songs of 
the Sunlands in 1873, and other volumes in subsequent years. 
The Danites in the Sierras, a novel, has been successfully 
dramatized. His later years have been spent near Oakland, 
California. But he remains young and adventuresome in spirit. 
In 1898 he went to the Klondike, not for gold, for which he 



282 PROSE AND POETRY IN THE WEST 

has always professed a fine contempt, but to be again with the 
vanguard of pioneers. The trouble in China in 1900 also 
found him at the scene of activity as a newspaper correspond- 
ent. But while Mr. Miller has maintained a certain promi- 
nence in the ranks of journalism, he has scarcely made good his 
early claim to serious consideration as a poet. Too many 
allowances must be made for his poetry. Lyrical before all 
else, it is exasperatingly careless — unsj^mmetrical and diffuse. 
It is overwrought in imagery, and makes use of all the Swin- 
burnian devices of assonance and alliteration, without showing 
Swinburne's fine instinct for harmony. The most that can be 
said in praise of it is that it has glimpses of wild beauty with 
here and there a passage that is genuinely melodious, as in 
Sunrise in Venice and The Rhyme of the Great River, and that 
it breathes a spirit of rude chivalry, espousing with proud 
indiscrimination the cause of all the poor, the outcast, and 
the oppressed. 

Two writers, who, though brought up in New England and 
showing the strongest aflSliations with the eastern school, are 

yet commonly classed with the writers of the West 
^f.'.flff^' because their most significant work was done there, 

are Edward Rowland Sill and Helen Fiske Jackson. 
Sill was a native of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale who 
went to California by sea in 1862, and remained there, with the 
exception of four years spent in journalism and teaching in 
New York and Ohio, until 1883. He held for some years the 
chair of English literature in the University of California. 
Four years after his second return to the East he died, at Cuy- 
ahoga Falls, Ohio. Three slender collections of his poems 
have been published — one in 1868, one in the year of his 
death, and one in 1899. There is also a posthumous volume 
of prose, containing essays on nature, literature, psychology, 
etc. Sill is readily seen to have been a true singer, though of 



SILL, HELEN F. JACKSON 283 

the minor choir. He did nothing of large scope. His longest 
poem, The Hermitage^ is rather a series of short poems. Tlw 
Venus of Milo is about twice as long as Thanatopsis. The other 
poems do not commonly exceed half a dozen stanzas. Seldom, 
too, is the lyric quality striking. It is their compressed 
thought that gives the poems distinction. There is neither 
mediocrity of substance nor diffuseness of expression. Here 
and there is a note that is strongly Emersonian. The most 
characteristic thing, however, is a quality not Emersonian, — a 
haunting sense of the tragi-comedy of human life, a restless- 
ness in the presence of its mysteries, and even a tendency to 
brood upon the major mystery of death. At one time, with a 
cheery recall to the primitive simplicities, 

" Life is a game the soul can play 
With fewer pieces than men say," 

but at another, "Life is a blindfold game." Thus one cannot 

safely go to these poems for rest. But Life^ The FooVs Prayer, 

Opportunity^ The Invisible, Two Views of It, Strange, Truth at 

Last, and many more, show that Sill had some glimpses behind 

the curtain which he is willing to share with those who are 

prepared for either chance — to shudder or to smile. 

Mrs. Helen Fiske Jackson, long known as Helen Hunt or 

"H. H.," at onetime wife of Captain Hunt of the United 

States Army and later of Mr. Jackson, a banker of 
Helen Fisk« Colorado Springs, was born at Amherst, Massachu- 
1831-1885. setts, and spent only the last ten years of her life 

in the West. The earlier part of her life, and 
especially the sorrows with which it was clouded, found 
expresssion in poetry. She published a volume of verse in 
1870; and it seems not too much to say of such of her poems 
as Spinning, Coronation, or the sonnets Morn and Thought, 
that they evince a higher imagination than those of any other 
American woman poet except her fellow townswoman, Emily 



284 PEOSE AND POETRY IN THE WEST 

Dickinson. But she lived to write a novel that set her name, 
with the multitude at least, in a higher place, and her fame 
will henceforth be most closely associated with that. After 
her removal to Colorado she became interested in the condition 
of the American Indians and their ill treatment by government 
agents, and in 1881 published a protest in their behalf {A 
Century of Dishonor), which led to her appointment as special 
examiner to the mission Indians of California. The final out- 
come was the composition and publication of her novel, 
Ramona, in 1884. Ramona scarcely needs description, any 
more than Uncle Tom^s Cabin. It was written in the same 
sincere philanthropic spirit, and although, like Mrs. Stowe's 
book, or Cooper's novels, it idealizes somewhat the objects of 
its defence, such idealization is surely pardonable. Artistically 
considered, it is one of the finest creations of our fiction — a 
romance so infused with tropic warmth and glow, and so per- 
meated with human sympathy, that its pictures of Arcadian 
life in old California and the gentle figures of Ramona, Aless- 
andro, and Father Salvierderra will not easily fade. 

The Middle West, in its entire expanse from the Ohio Val- 
ley to the Rocky Mountains, has been rather slower than the 
Pacific Slope to bring forth either poetry or prose, 
Eugene Field, ^^^ -^ g^-jj j^^g YiHIq of worth to its Credit. If 

1850-1895. 

any of its literature, besides the works of Mark 
Twain already mentioned, has a chance for such "immortality" 
as literature may attain to, one thinks it must be some of the 
children's poems of Eugene Field. Field, who was born at 
St. Louis, was, during his too short life, a hard-working 
journalist in various cities of the west from Denver to Chicago. 
He did his latest and best work at Chicago. He had a schol- 
arly mind, which revealed itself in his most trifiing hack work ; 
and he made some delightful free translations and paraphrases 
of Horace {Echoes from the Sahine Farm, with R. M. Field, 



FIELD 285 

1893). A true bibliophile, he wrote much upon the love of 
books. But the love of children called forth his best work, 
and his poems thus inspired, easily comparable to Stevenson's 
in their mingled quaintness, humor, and pathos, are scarcely 
second to any in the language. Little Boy Blue, Wynken, 
BlynJcen, and Nod, and half a dozen others, though barely ten 
years old, have already become classics. 

Other writers of the Middle and Far West come readily to 
mind. There is James Whitcomb Riley, of Indiana, another 
typical rover and journalist, well-known for his dialect poems 
of humble life, and the author of child verse almost as popular 
though never so entirely unaffected as Field's. There is Edwin 
Markham, of Oregon and California, lately sprung into fame 
with his over-praised poem. The Man with the Hoe, but before 
that the author of many a genuine lyric unfretted with sense 
of social wrong. And to go back almost to an earlier genera- 
tion there are, or were, John Hay, the Piatts, Richard Realf, 
and more. But here it is safest to pause. The anthologies 
will winnow out such productions of these as have any perma- 
nent significance. The later novelists remain, and in them, 
possibly, the hope of the coming literature of this section now 
lies ; but none of them as yet call for special treatment and the 
mention of whatever promise they reveal will be reserved for 
another place. 



CHAPTER X 
POETEY AND CEITICISM IN THE EAST 

The later literature of the north and middle Atlantic states 
stands forth in no such clear outlines as that of either the 
South or the West. In this eastern region, of course, the suc- 
cession was never entirely broken, and it is not easy to sepa- 
rate later writers from earlier, especially since the later largely 
uphold familiar traditions, standing for the inherited ideals of 
dignity, scholarship, refinement, taste, and finish. But a dif- 
ference in quality may be detected, possibly because the later 
writers have suflfered from the very fact of having clung to 
their inheritance. The old veins were worked out and new 
were not found. The earlier writers, too, many of whom lived 
on into an active old age, overshadowing their natural succes- 
sors, were natively superior in all points of genius. In the 
field of poetry in particular, the very best of the later writers 
have been the readiest to recognize the easy pre-eminence of 
the elder group ; so that, feeling no insistent voice within and 
finding no encouraging demand from without, they have pro- 
duced sparingly and are even disposed, as the years go by, to 
reduce the bulk of their acknowledged product. Another 
restraining factor which must doubtless be taken into account, 
is the gradual encroachment of the virile and picturesque 
literature of the South and the West, which the East itself has 
been prone to treat lightly, but which has often penetrated 
more readily into the centres of European culture than anything 
the conservative East has produced. 

286 



ALDRICH 287 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was one of the first to publish of 
the eastern succession, and has been most steadfast in his 
devotion to the profession of his early choice. He 
1836- ' "^^s born in New Hampshire, passed a part of his 

youth in Louisiana, and, foregoing a college edu- 
cation, at the age of seventeen entered journalism at New 
York, where he won the friendship of Willis and became asso- 
ciated with Taylor, Stoddard, and Stedman. There, before he 
was twenty, he wrote the pathetic Ballad of Bahie Bell, and 
also published his first volume of verse, The Bells (1854). A 
few years later he removed to Boston and became an integral 
part of the literary life of New England. Lowell, the first 
editor of the Atlantic Monthly, had welcomed his contributions 
to that magazine, and in 1881 Mr. Aldrich found himself in 
the editor's chair with Lowell as his contributor. He remained 
editor of the Atlantic for nine years, and his contributions to it 
number over a hundred. His poems have appeared in many 
successive volumes and editions. 

Though Aldrich works with comparative ease in a variety 
of forms, from the sonnet to dramatic blank verse, he is at his 
best in lyrics of sentiment and fancy and the polished trifles 
that go to make up "society verse." One critic has ventured 
to say that he recalls the English Herrick. He has some 
characteristics in common with Longfellow. But Longfellow's 
simplicity is often replaced in Aldrich by a greater subtlety of 
thought and overlaid with a more elaborate art. His romantic 
fancy, too, has more of the far East in it than Longfellow's. 
Like Stoddard, he fell under the influence of Taylor's travel- 
enriched fancy, and he afl^ects strains that are ' ' blent with 
odors from the Orient." His Dressing the Bride and When the 
Sultan Goes to Ispahan are replete with color and all sensuous 
appeals. He is better known, however, by such simpler lyrics 
as Bahie Bell, Before the Rain, and The Face Against the Pane. 



288 POETRY AND CRITICISM IN THE EAST 

Nor is it to be forgotten that Aldrich immensely widened 
his audience by those prose tales with which, in middle life, he 
began to vary the product of his pen, and which are marked 
by the same daintiness and artistic charm as his poetry, sup- 
plemented with a rare quality of humor. The Story of a Bad 
Boy (1870), Marjorie Daw (1873), and Two Bites at a Cherry 
(1893) are all well known. The first, largely drawn from 
memories of Portsmouth, the city of his birth, has become a 
classic "juvenile"; it was a forerunner of various books in a 
similar vein, notably Warner's Being a Boy and Howells's A 
Boy's Town. The second, Marjorie Daw, ranks among the 
very best short stories written by American authors. 

Classification and comparison, in the case of a poet like 

Emily Dickinson, avail nothing. She was modern; beyond 

that the chances of time and place do not signify; 

Emily Dxckin- ^^^ j^£g ^^^ j^^^. pQ^^j-y ^gj^.^ equally remote from 

son, 1830-1886. tr j M j 

the ways of others. Her years were passed in 
seclusion at Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was 
treasurer of Amherst College. Her scanty verses, a kind of 
soul's diary, written with no thought of publication, became 
known to a few friends, and after much persuasion she allowed 
two or three to be published during her life-time. A volume 
was published only after her death, in 1890. The poems 
baffle description. They seldom have titles, and sometimes no 
more words than poets three centuries ago put into their titles, 
for she pours her words as a chemist his tinctures, fearful of 
a drop too much. Two stanzas, of four lines each, imperfectly 
rhymed, and with about four words to the line, are her favorite 
form. A fourteen-line sonnet is spacious by the side of such 
poems. Yet few sonnets have ever compressed so much within 
their bounds. To read one is to be given a pause that will 
outlast the reading of many sonnets; for they come with reve- 
lation, like a flash of lightning that illuminates a landscape 





GEORGE AVASHUSreXON CABLE WILLIAM DEAJSf HO^VELLS 

FRANCIS BREX HARXE SAMUEL LATsGHORISrE CLEM:eNS 



EMILY DICKINSON, STEDMAN 289 

by night and startles with glimpses into an unimagined world. 
They bear witness in every word to their high inspiration. But 
stamped though they be with the celestial signature, they are 
but fragments, and in the temple of art, which keeps its niches 
for the perfect statue, they must shine obscurely. 

Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moul- 
ton, Mrs. Celia Leighton Thaxter, and yet others of the New 
England songsters might be named here, but none has written 
what is ineffaceable and it seems idle to swell the temporary 
record. 

Turning to New York, we are met at once by a veteran of 

letters already several times named in this history — Edmund 

Clarence Stedman, the poet-critic, a friend of 

E^^c. Sfedman,^^^^^,^^ ^jj ^^^ literary men of New York both older 

and younger. He is slightly the senior of Aldrich, 
whom he knew before Aldrich went to Boston, and slightly 
the junior of the New York and Philadelphia group of poet- 
journalists — Taylor, Stoddard, Boker, etc., — most of whom 
are now dead. He is a native of Hartford, Connecticut, and 
his brief college course of two years was taken at Yale. His 
newspaper life in New York began in 1855, and for several 
3'ears during the Civil War he was war correspondent of the New 
York World, gaining experience which he subsequently turned 
to good account in his verse. His later life has been spent 
mainly on the Stock Exchange, — a career which has afforded 
him leisure for his seldom interrupted literary pursuits. His 
poems comprise Poems Lyric and Idyllic (1860), Alice of Mon- 
mouth (1863), The Blameless Prince (1869), Hawthorne^ and 
Other Poems (1877), and later lyrics and idyls. 

Stedman, like most of his associates, is to be classed with 
the poets of the artist type — the poets whose creative impulse 
is never so strong as to make them forget the requirements of 
technical perfection. But Stedman chooses his themes rather 



290 POETRY AXD CRITICISM IN THE EAST 

nearer to the ordinary interests of life than, for instance, Aid- 
rich: he likes narrative and dramatic as well as h'ric themes. 
By virtue of Hoic Old Brown Took Harper's Ferry^ Alice of 
Monmouth, Wanted — A 3Ian, and Gettysburg, he became one 
more of our laureates of the great war. Yet he is never a 
passionate singer. Even heroic deeds are likely to receive at 
his hands the highly artistic treatment which results in the 
idyl, and this, as his titles show, is one of his favorite forms 
of poetry. At times, his fancy has played with lighter occa- 
sional and bohemian verse. The city finds him a sympathetic 
bard, and a wandering organ-grinder called forth a unique 
poem of genuine inspiration — Pan in Wall Street. 

Mr. Stedman's later energies have been given over to crit- 
ical work, and he has published Victorian Poets (1875), Poets 
of America (1885), and The Nature and Elements of Poetry 
(1892), with their accompanying Anthologies. By these 
works, with their poetic sympathy and insight, sane judgment, 
luminous style, and kindly, sometimes over-kindl}', temper, he 
has placed himself foremost among our literary critics since 
Lowell. His service, indeed, has been peculiarly great. He 
has done one thing that Lowell was not fitted to do. He has 
helped to put criticism on a fairly definite basis without re- 
moving it from the realm of personal taste and appreciation. 
Scholars are under obligations to him for the measure of order 
which he has introduced into the chaos of minor contemporary 
poetry, while many a young student owes him a debt for being 
set in the way to a love of the best that literature can afford. 

Among writers of the -Middle East whose work has been 

done outside of the cities, perhaps the most prominent is John 

Burroughs, who was born in the Catskill region of 

John Bur- -^^^ York in 1837. Apart from a few years spent 

roughs, 1S37- ^ u ^ 

in teaching and as a Treasury clerk at Washington, 

Mr. Burroughs has remained devoted to the country life in 



BURROUGHS 291 

which he received his earliest training. His writings, largely 
the fruits of his studies of nature, whether of the habits of 
birds or of the habits of berries, which he loves to cultivate, 
inevitably remind us of those of Thoreau, of whom in his 
naturalist's ardor he is fully the equal. But he is quite with- 
out Thoreau's eccentricity of temper. As befits a writer of 
the later time, he carries with him more of the scientist's spirit, 
and he is never obtrusive with his moralizing. One gets 
from him undiluted sunshine and field-odor and bird- song. 
Wake-Rohiii (1871), Winter Sunshine (1875), Birds and Poets 
(1877), Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Fresh Fields (1884), 
reveal in their titles not a little of their character. Mr. Bur- 
roughs is also a literary critic of fine perceptions and poetic 
sympathies, as his Indoor Studies (1889) shows. He was one 
of the earliest defenders of Walt Whitman, and has published 
several appreciative essays upon Whitman's work. Light 
of Day (1900) is a volume of religious discussions. To the 
general public, however, he remains the naturalist, and he has 
been a potent influence, after Thoreau, upon the large body 
of writers upon outdoor subjects who at present enjoy such 
popularity. 

Here might follow the names of many who have made later 
New York, even more conspicuously than later Boston, a cen- 
tre of literary activity. There are some, like Richard Watson 
Gilder, poet, and veteran editor of the Century^ who have long 
since won their circle of admirers. There are others, like 
George Edward Woodberry of Columbia University, alternately 
poet and critic, or Hamilton Wright Mabie of The Outlook^ 
critic and engaging essajist, who are yearly strengthening their 
claims to admiration. And there is, or rather was, one in par- 
ticular, who drifted from the West into the eastern metropolis, 
whom it is difficult not to praise at length, half in confidence 
that the future will sustain the praise. But though Richard 



292 POETRY AND CRITICISM IN THE EAST 

Hovey (1864-1900) easily surpassed all the younger singers 
in the native gift of poetry, his work scarcely bears the stamp 
of the great poet; his grasp upon life was not secure enough 
and his exuberant fancy nearly always fell short of the true 
shaping imagination, dallying with mere prettiness or wan- 
dering into regions of obscurity and mysticism, so that it is 
doubtful whether any further exercise of his powers would 
have made him more than death has now left him, a minor 
singer. Poetry and criticism, it would seem, simply hold their 
own in the East, keeping still at the lower level where they 
were left by the death of Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes. 
There, as elsewhere, fiction now affords the preferred outlet of 
creative activity. 



CHAPTER XI 
LATE MOVEMENTS IN FICTION 

The chansje that came over American literature in the latter 
part of the nineteenth century is most perceptible in the 
method and spirit of its fiction. It must be evident to the 
most casual observer that fiction has developed out of all pro- 
portion to other literary forms, until now the novel furnishes 
the staple leisure-reading of nearly all classes. So rapid, how- 
ever, has been this development, and so multiform are its 
products, which change form almost from day to day, that 
anj^thing like a history of the movement is at this stage impos- 
sible. The most that can be done is to indicate a few of the 
major tendencies and to put on record a few of the more 
important names. 

Foremost among the changes to be noted has been the rise 
of what is commonly known as realism. This has been pro- 
fessedly an attempt to draw nearer to the conditions of real 
life. Vagueness of scene, abnormal characters, mysterious 
and impossible happenings, have been abandoned in favor of 
familiar and even commonplace scenes and events. The in- 
terest of plot, with its elements of surprise and terror, has 
been subordinated to the interest attaching to the development 
of character in the midst of the actual problems of existence. 
In short, romanticism, or the unrestrained play of fancy, has 
given way to simple fidelity to truth, and we no longer call 
our works of fiction romances, but novels. In this matter 
America has been a close follower in the footsteps of 

293 



294 LATE MOVEMENTS IN FICTION 

G-reat Britain. The change from Brown, Cooper, and Poe, 
through Hawthorne, Mrs. Stowe, and Holmes, to Bret Harte, 
Howells, and James, may be hkened (though the individual 
comparisons will not hold) to the change from Scott and Bul- 
wer. through Charlotte Bronte and Dickens, to Thackeray, 
George Eliot, and Meredith. 

Concomitant with this development of the novel of charac- 
ter, of social problems, and of realistic scenes, there has been 
a marked tendency to specialize or localize. Every profession 
and occupation, from the priest's to the ward politician's, 
from the banker's to the burglar's, has been thoroughly ex- 
ploited by the industrious novelist. Every section of the coun- 
try, too, from the lakes and pine forests of northern Maine to 
the deserts and orange orchards of southern California, has 
found, or seems destined to find, its local historian in the guise 
of a writer of fiction. This has gradually led to a more and 
more lavish use of '• local color " — that is, technicalities of 
profession or trade, details of local scenery, and above all, 
provincial dialect, to secure which the novelist often goes 
deliberately into a course of training. Fiction almost ceases 
to be fiction in its photographic reproduction of unselect^d and 
unarranged facts. It is clear that this is a natural but ex- 
treme outgrowth of the realistic method. There is, of course, 
virtue in local color, and the greatest artist need not. perhaps 
henceforth may not, dispense with it. But it cannot alone 
carry a piece of fiction beyond the temporary popularity which 
waits on novelty. The great work of art must portray, under 
whatever local and temporary guises, universal and eternal 
verities. 

Turning from the character of this late fiction to its form, 
we note, in addition to the novel of standard length, a very 
popular variety known as the short story. The main char- 
acteristics of the short story are the same as those of the 



THE SHORT STORY 295 

novel, except that, instead of a long series of incidents, but a 
single situation is presented, or at the most two or three, with 
the connecting incidents omitted. The form has doubtless 
grown out of the tendency toward compression which marks 
the continued development of an art, and is fostered by the 
spirit of an age that is restless even in its leisure. It has 
been further encouraged b}^ the rise in America of the popular 
monthly magazine, which depends quite as much upon the sale 
of single numbers as upon annual subscriptions. It is not to 
be forgotten, however, that the short story had an early par- 
allel in the romantic tale, which bore about the same relation 
to the full}^ developed romance as the short story bears to the 
novel ; and the tale, as perfected by Poe and Hawthorne, is one 
of the signal achievements of American letters. It was there- 
fore natural that the short story should attain in America a high 
development, and certainly it is to be regarded, in its form if 
not in its substance, as American (and French) rather than as 
British. G-reat Britain has now several masters of the kind in 
the persons of Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and a few 
writers of the Scotch school, but a good many years before 
their triumphs the form was being perfected in the far West of 
America by Bret Harte, to say nothing of such less frequent 
but successful eastern experimenters as Hale and Aldrich. 

These things are already sufficiently matters of history, but 
beyond these it would be difficult to go. The minor tendencies 
in fiction of the present time, not a few of which are easily to 
be detected, lack as yet the steadiness of a distinct drift and 
they must await the future chronicler. It remains for us only 
to consider a few of the late novelists who have won national 
recognition. Nor can there be anything like a careful classi- 
fication of these. Many, indeed, who might well be m the 
company, have already been considered. Holmes himself was 
a late novelist, but other considerations have relegated him to 



296 LATE MOVEMENTS IN FICTION 

another time and place. So with Hale, Higginson, Holland, and 
Warner. So with Aldrich, a later and real contemporary. So 
even with Clemens, Mrs. Jackson, and Bret Harte. Clemens 
came to fame as a humorist ; Mrs. Jackson was a poet, and her 
one novel bears no direct relation to the other fiction of the 
time; and Bret Harte himself not only was half a poet, but he 
worked so early and has remained so aloof, that there can be 
little impropriety in having removed him from this group, 
though his great importance as a forerunner and a really gen- 
etic influence must always be kept in mind. 

The position of precedence here very properly falls to Wil- 
liam Dean Howells, who, though bom in Ohio, has been 

closely associated through a long literary career 
w^- ^oiv€il8,^^Yi the writers and magazines of the Atlantic 

cities, and who, by energy, industry, and sound 
craftsmanship, has won his way to a position of leadership 
there among the later novelists and miscellaneous writers 
similar to that occupied by Mr. Aldrich among poets and Mr. 
Stedman amonof critics. Mr. Howells, like Bavard Tavlor, had 
always literary proclivities. His early training was received in 
a country printing-oflSce, and before he made, at the age of 
twenty-two, his first pilgrimage to Boston and New York, he had 
become acquainted with Spanish, Italian, and German literature. 
He was already contributing to magazines, and he published in 
1860, with John J. Piatt, Poems of Two Friends. During 
the Civil War he was abroad as United States consul at Venice, 
and the delightful Venetian Life and Italian Journeys, which 
were published as the immediate result of this formative period 
of his literary life, fixed his reputation. He was editor of 
the Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881, when he was suc- 
ceeded by Mr. Aldrich, and he has been connected in various 
capacities with The Nation, Harpers Magazine, The Cos- 
mopolitan, and other journals. His literary product has been 



HOWELLS 297 

large and varied. There have been several volumes of 
poems, not only early in his life, but one — Stops of Various 
Quills — as late as 1895. There are prose volumes of travel 
biography, and criticism; light parlor comedies and farces, 
such as The Parlor Car and TJie Mousetrap; disguised studies 
in sociology, such as A Traveller from Altruria (1894); and 
volumes of reminiscence, more or less autobiographical, in- 
cluding A Boy's Town (1890), My Literary Passions (1895), 
and Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900). Outweighing 
all these, however, in bulk and importance are his novels, 
beginning with Tlieir Wedding Journey in 1871 and including 
among the best A Foregone Conclusion (1874), The Lady of 
the Aroostook (1879), A Modern Instance (1882), Ihe Rise of 
Silas Lapham (1885), The Minister's Charge (1886), and A 
Hazard of New Fortunes (1889)= 

Mr. Howells has long been conceded to be a leader, if not 
indeed the founder, of the late school of American fiction. It 
is the school of realism already described, and its great repre- 
sentatives in other countries have always been admired and 
defended by Mr. Howells— the French Flaubert, for instance, 
the Kussian Turgenieff and Tolstoi, and the Norwegian Ibsen. 
The realist (or ' 'veritist, " or ' 'naturalist, " as he variously prefers 
to be called) seeks his material in what he can observe and is 
opposed to altering it very much by either selection or rejec- 
tion. His art, in the words of Mr. Howells, must be ' ' true to 
the motives, the influences, the principles that shape the life 
of actual men and women." Sometimes, particularly with the 
French school, it leads him to the portrayal of all that is 
coarse, criminal, and revolting in life, so that the word realism 
has been often improperly narrowed to this. Mr. Howells, 
however, with most American writers, has avoided the worst 
phases of life. Indeed, he would regard such realism as 
a kind of untruth, scarcely less false in its emphasis than 



298 LATE MOVEMENTS IN FICTION 

the romanticism which confined itself to the rose-colored ex- 
istence and the impossible deeds of princes, knights, and 
ladies. He seeks to portray the average man and woman 
under average circumstances, — Silas Lapham, an enriched 
plebeian struggling for social recognition, Lemuel Barker, a 
country youth pushing his way to fortune in the city, Marcia 
Gaylord, an irresponsible young woman going through the 
disillusioning experience of a loveless marriage, — all with pains- 
taking portrayal of the minutest incidents in the life of the 
characters, and an unshrinking exposition of their unlovely 
traits of mind and heart, as well as of their better thoughts 
and aspirations. It may, indeed, be doubted whether such 
situations and such a method can bring out real character and 
show what humanity is capable of, whether they can better 
fortify us for enduring the trials of our own existence, whether, 
in short, there is any profit for us in an art that reveals little 
but what we can all see around us. But these are questions 
which each reader will answer according to his temperament. 
Some need the incitement of a glorified vision — of life as it 
might be ; some, over-imaginative, need the wholesome correc- 
tive of life as it is. As for Mr. Howells, though his novels 
may at times be found tedious in incident and unsatisfying 
in conclusion, all readers must grant to him a deep insight 
into character, a power of exceptionally accurate and vivid 
portraiture, both of people and of scenes, and a never failing 
humor and charm of style. 

Henry James, whose name has long been coupled with that 

of Mr. Howells- as a writer of the same school, was born at 

New York and educated partly in France and 

Henry James, Switzerland. Since 1869 he has lived so con- 

1843- , ^ ^ ^ 

stantly in England that his title to be regarded as 
an American author is rather slight. Besides various sketches 
and essays in travel, biography, and criticism, his numerous 



JAMES, MAHY E. WILKINS 299 

novels include The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), 
Daisy Miller: A Study (1878; later also Daisy Miller: A 
Comedy), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians 
(1886), and Ihe Princess Casamassima (1886). Mr. James, 
with his knowledge of American character and also of European 
life and society, has largely occupied himself with portraying 
Americans in a European environment, so that the name 
"international" is sometimes applied to his novels. But 
Americans, it must be said, have often resented his portrayals 
as inaccurate or at least as unfair to the truest types of Ameri- 
can manhood and womanhood. Naturally, others cannot be ex- 
pected to see Americans as they see themselves, and Mr. 
James almost belongs among the "others." In his realistic 
method he has gone a step beyond Mr. Howells, being utterly 
tireless in reporting trivial conversations and depicting the min- 
utiae of actions and manners. This kind of analysis, purposely 
subordinating dramatic effects and leaving the characters to be 
deduced as from a photograph, results, in the eyes of Mr. 
James's hostile critics, only in analysing the heart out of his 
characters ; he seems too clever to be strong and. human. His 
style, however, like that of Mr. Howells, is polished, witty, in 
a way brilliant. And though there are many readers who 
cannot like his novels, there are others who find in them the 
perfection of the novelist's art and have made of their admira- 
tion almost a cult. 

Of the younger realists, who have so increasingly confined 

their attention to the provincial, or local, novel, Miss Mary E. 

Wilkins is perhaps the foremost representative. 

Mary E. Wii- gj^^ jg ^f ^e^y England, and though that section of 

kins, 1862- ^ ° 

the country would seem to hold small promise for a 
writer of her kind, she has found there, in the farms and villages 
that have been least touched by the spirit of modern progress, 
material which to most readers is sufficiently novel and which 



300 LATE MOVEMENTS IN FICTION 

she has succeeded in investing with not a little charm. The sto- 
ries by which she established her reputation were collected under 
the titles of A HumUe Romance, and Other Stories (1887) and 
A New England Nun (1891). Those who are well-read in fic- 
tion will perceive that Miss Wilkins's work does not differ radi- 
cally from that of a dozen predecessors ; — the kind, indeed, can 
be easily traced back through writers like Margaret Deland, 
Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 'Ward, and 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to Harriet Beecher Stowe. But, 
as intimated above, Miss Wilkins has brought into combination 
more of the methods of the later writers. Working best with 
the short story, she has not hesitated to apply to it all the arts 
of the more elaborate realists. She has the primary requisites 
of her school — intimate knowledge of her environment, powers 
of patient and acute observation, lively sympathy, and abun- 
dant humor. She presents unmistakably real people and scenes 
— farmers, pedlers, district school teachers, afternoon teas, 
quilting-bees. New England door-yards with cinnamon rose- 
bushes, cemeteries with evergreen fences and weeping-willows. 
But she does not content herself with description and with con- 
versation in rustic dialect. She never forgets that it is her 
business to tell a story; and just when the reader begins to feel 
stifled by the narrowness and dreariness of this homely life — 
to grow weary of the eternal old ladies knitting or demure 
young women in old-fashioned muslin gowns — she heightens 
the tale with a touch of the dramatic or throws in a sudden 
glint of romance. Human hearts are shown beating in the 
humblest of bosoms, and heroism itself is allowed not to be in- 
compatible with life's daily round. This is doubtless the high- 
est triumph of realism, and there are few of Miss Wilkins's 
stories that do not leave one with a sense of ''more than 
meets the eye." 

Frank R. Stockton, of Philadelphia, has won a unique 



STOCKTON 301 

place among the late writers of fiction by combining the methods 
of the romancer and the novelist to humorous 
i^.i?.5^;oc^•^o?^, ends. Mr. Stockton's early work was done as 
a journalist. For a time he was assistant ed- 
itor of St. NiclioJas and he wrote some popular juvenile 
stories. With Rudder Grange, in 1879, he obtained fame 
among older readers as a humorous writer of unusual gifts, and 
the short story of The Lady or the Tiger ^ published in 1884, 
gave him a place which he has securely held ever since. Mr. 
Stockton's romancing is of the wildest and most whimsical 
kind and has in it much of the mock-heroic. . The foundation 
of his humor is the incongruous. He delights in getting his 
characters, in themselves essentially modern and common- 
place, into the most absurdly impossible situations, treating 
them all the time with an assumption of the utmost gravity. 
This fantastic humor of situation, for which there seems to 
be no adequate description but the word " Stocktonian, " may 
be found in almost all of his novels and short stories — The 
Late Mrs. Null, The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. 
Aleshine, The Hundredth Man, AJloat and Ashore, etc. His 
short stories are usually his best. 

Though Mr. Stockton is quite without a rival in his peculiar 
field, mention should be made in passing of another writer of 
the Middle East — or properly of the South, for he is a native 
of Baltimore — Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, whose humor, like 
Mark Twain's, is more integrally a part of the genuine charac- 
ters which he portrays, and whose Colonel Carter of Cartersville 
stands a fair chance of becoming a classic. 

As was pointed out in the chapter on southern poetry, there 
was in the South, after the middle of the century, a marked 
intermission in the production of prose fiction. Simms's ro- 
mances stopped with the war, and there were only a few 
such scarcely significant writers as John Esten Cooke, Mary 



302 LATE IMOVEMENTS IN FICTION 

Virginia Terhune, and Augusta J. Evans to cawy on the work. 
Not until about 1880 did the new South give evidence of 
a new school of fiction. To be sure, a somewhat noteworthy 
contribution to the fiction of local scenes, character, and dialect, 
was made in the later sixties by Colonel R. M. Johnston, with 
his genial and humorous sketches of life among the G-eorgia 
"crackers," but even these were not published in a collective 
edition until the interest in prose had revived. Now, however, 
that the energies of southern writers have been turned once 
more toward fiction, the product is rapidly becoming both large 
in quantity and high in quality. In general character and 
method it allies itself readily enough with all the later fiction 
of the country; but the picturesque nature of the scenes por- 
trayed, together, perhaps, with a more tropical imagination on 
the part of the writers, has served to throw about it much more 
of romantic glamour. Prominent among these writers are to 
be named Joel Chandler Harris, of Georgia, who, in his crea- 
tion of Uncle Remus, has given the plantation negro a perma- 
nent place in fiction ; Thomas Nelson Page, of Virginia, who 
has reflected through the negro character, and with a faithful 
record of the negro dialect of the peculiar Virginian variety, 
the aristocratic society of the Old Dominion; and Miss Mary 
N. Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock"), of Tennessee, a 
writer of the descriptive or landscape school, who has wrought 
into the tapestrj^ of her work the endless panorama of the 
hours and the seasons in the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern 
Tennessee. 

But the leading spirit of this later activity, especially in its 

more romantic aspects, is to be sought still farther south. 

For twenty years George Washington Cable has 

G. w. Cable, j^^j^ ^-^j^ -g^.^^ EsLite and Howells, the position 

1844- ' ' ^ 

of one of America's most distinctive novelists. 
He was born in New Orleans in 1844. After a short service 



CABLE, ALLEN 303 

in early manhood as a cavalryman in the Confederate army, 
he entered upon a struggling career in his native city, at one 
time as a clerk in a cotton factor's office and again as a reporter 
on the New Orleans Picayune. He chanced thus to obtain a 
close knowledge of the life and character of the Louisiana 
Creoles, both in the city and among the bayous of the lower 
Mississippi, and this knowledge he made the foundation of his 
earliest essays in literature. His sketches, which appeared first 
in Scrihner's Magazine and which were collected in 1879 under 
the title of Old Creole Bays, attracted much attention and 
were rapidly followed by more elaborate romances — The 
Grandissimes (1880); Madame Delpliine (1881); Dr. Sevier 
(1884); Bonaventure (1888); etc. Of late years, Mr. Cable, 
who now lives in the North, has taken interest in several phil- 
anthropic projects, and he has done not a little, both through 
his novels and through readings and lectures, to bring the 
South and the North into closer sympathy. Of real service 
in this direction, for example, is his John March, Southerner 
(1894), a novel of the reconstruction period. But his 
best work is to be found in his early romantic, almost 
poetic, stories of that quaint, remote life of the southern 
Creoles, which seems so detached from all that we commonly 
think of as American. He had precisely the qualifications 
that were needed for such work — a strong imagination, quick 
sensibilities, an equal command of humor and of pathos, and 
a picturesque st3^1e; and he succeeded in enriching southern 
literature as no prose writer before him had done. 

Another southern writer of this semi-romantic type — an- 
other projector, that is to say, of very real characters against 

a romantic background — is James Lane Allen. Mr. 
^'^' ^^^^^' Allen, who has come into prominence within the last 

ten years, has made himself known as the novelist 
of Kentucky, and in so far he is a writer of the "local" 
school. As such, however, he depends more on the charms of 



304 LATE MOVEMENTS IN FICTION 

nature and landscape than on dialect, breathing the freshness 
of spring into his A Kentuckij Cardinal and Aftermath^ or satu- 
rating his A Summer in Arcady with southern warmth and 
sunshine. But it would be a mistake to regard Mr. Allen as 
merely a local novelist. The characters which he portrays and 
the problems of life amidst which they are compelled to work 
out their destinies are not to be circumscribed by state bound- 
ary lines. His writings thus challenge comparison with the 
highest in fiction; and indeed The Choir Invisible (1897), in its 
slightness of plot, its searching analysis, and its intense real- 
ization of inner experiences, suggests Hawthorne. It is when 
confronted by work like this that we are led to the judgment 
that the strength of American literature at the present time 
lies in its fiction. 

Since Mark Twain and Bret Harte left the Middle and the 
Far West, scarcely a novelist of importance has arisen in that 
territory. One, contemporary with these, Edward Eggleston, 
of Indiana, has been a popular historian of log cabin life — of 
the raw civilization that was found among the early settlers of 
the Mississippi valley; another, Constance Fenimore Woolson, 
exploited the region from the shores of Lake Superior to the 
Grulf ; and not a few later writers — Mrs. Catherwood, Miss 
Foote, Miss French, Henry B. Fuller, Hamlin G-arland, Ches- 
ter Bailey Fernald— have presented one type or another of its 
motley population, from the French explorers of the Old 
Northwest to the "cliff-dwellers " of modern Chicago, and from 
the claim-holders of Dakota to the gamblers and ' 'high-binders" 
of San Francisco's Chinatown. But while one of these writ- 
ers has fancy, and another technique, and another strength, and 
another humor, it is too early to say that any of them have 
brought the right combination of powers to their task, and the 
scenes and characters which they have more or less faithfully 
portrayed still await the final delineator. 



CONCLUSION 

Our review of the later American writers has kept pretty 
carefully within the field of legitimate letters. Did we care to 
extend the survey to the borders of that field where knowledge 
counts for more than imagination, we should be met at once 
by an army of industrious authors, including some, indeed, who 
might well find a place in this record. Oratory would offer no 
names, for the pulpit, the halls of legislature, and the public 
platform alike, reveal no speaker of importance since Curtis. 
Journalism, however, history, and the various departments of 
science, are fields of intense activity. In historical writing a pro- 
digious amount of work is being done, and of such a sound qual- 
ity that it threatens to make obsolete most of the work of the 
past. The names are many — in the field of American history, 
Goldwin Smith, Charles Francis Adams, Henry Adams, Von 
Hoist, Fiske, Eggleston, Winsor, Schouler, Rhodes, McMaster, 
Woodrow Wilson; in American history and literature, Moses 
Coit Tyler and Barrett Wendell; in ecclesiastical history, 
Henry C. Lea; in British naval history, Captain Mahan. Of 
these names (Groldwin Smith, as an English Canadian, scarcely 
comes within our purview), perhaps three stand out con- 
spicuously — Henry Adams, Hermann von Hoist, and John 
Fiske; though it is probable that only Mr. Fiske has touched 
on such subjects and employed such a method and style as to 
reach many readers whose interests lie outside of special his- 
torical lines. The methods of the later historians have not 
tended to make general literature of their work ; and the same 
thing is true in all branches of scholarship. It is, indeed, 

305 



306 COXCLUSION 

difficult to resist including here the names of many specialists, 
— such as Francis A. Walker and Kichard T. Ely in social 
and political science, E. L. Godkin in government, William 
James and Josiah Royce in philosophy, Simon Xewcomb and 
N. S. Shaler in science, F. J. Furnivall and H. H. Furness 
in English language and literature, Drs. Eliot, Thwing, and 
Butler in education. But our definition of literature, as some- 
thing that, even while it instructs, entertains by its appeal to 
the imagination, must often exclude greater names in favor of 
lesser. 

The conditions now obtaining in pure literature have already 
been somewhat specificall}^ set forth. Much poetry is being 
written, and some of it is read. The hundreds of versifiers have 
all a mastery of technique, and nearly all enough of the poetic 
spirit to keep them safely above the prose level. But they lack 
the qualities of real genius. Perhaps the highest promise of 
American poetry just now is to be found in Canada, where men 
like Charles Gr. D. Roberts, William Wilfred Campbell, and Bliss 
Carman (some of them now drifted across the border) are put- 
ting the wild beauty and romantic color of their native north 
into such intensely lyrical verse that American literature will 
speedily have to reckon with them. But in general our late 
poetry commands nothing more than a passing admiration ; it 
plays no such part in our spiritual life as the earlier poetry 
played and still plays. 

As for literary drama, it is neither written nor read. Here 
and there a man like Bronson Howard, the author of Saratoga 
and Shenandoah, has cultivated play- writing with practical 
success, but America seems to be farther from producing any- 
thing like genuine literary drama than it was in the days of 
Thomas Godfrey. Of course, the novel is in some sense a 
substitute for the drama and precludes the need of it. What 
the novel has developed into, we have seen. The interest 



CONCLUSION 307 

in the local or special novel is by no means abating. New 
fields are being ransacked — the Bowery, the tenement house, 
the club, the college, the corporation. Gold-hunters in the 
Klondike are bringing back strange and thrilling stories, and 
we may soon look to hear from the Philippines and 
China. Another notable direction, too, fiction is now tak- 
ing, in the revival of the romantic "historical novel." 
There promises to be no longer the dearth of tales of the 
colonial and revolutionary days that there once was, and some 
writers are even seeking far-away foreign and mediaeval 
themes, often with little historical or antiquarian knowledge 
upon which to base their fancies. This is perhaps a natural 
outcome of the revived taste, largely fostered by Robert Louis 
Stevenson, for the story of incident and adventure. Whether 
it will lead to a full revolt against realism and bring in once 
more a domination of romance, remains to be seen; but cer- 
tain it is that some of the writers just now riding on the high- 
est wave of popularity are workers in the field of more or less 
legitimate historical fiction. 

Lastly, there is the essay — critical, social, religious, dis- 
cursive, — perhaps the highest literary outcome of journalism. 
The frequency with which volumes of collected essays make 
their appearance would seem to indicate a peculiarly flourish- 
ing condition of the type. Certainly the type is popular, and 
many essayists may be readily named — Mr. Stedman, Mr. 
Woodberry, Mr. Mabie, Mr. Robert G-rant, Dr. van Dyke, — 
several of whom have already been discussed. But distinctive 
work in this kind is rare ; scarcely one essayist in a century 
attains greatness, and scarcely two in a generation are read 
into the next. The work of a hundred present day essayists 
is likely to be summed up and surpassed by some great social 
philosopher of the future. Meanwhile, one aspect of the con- 
temporaneous essay deserves attentign, Since the day of 



308 CONCLUSION 

Emerson and Thoreau the charm of out-door life — the lure 
of nature, tame or wild — has never quite lost its hold upon us. 
To-day we have, for strong witness to this fact, the writings 
of John Burroughs, Maurice Thompson, Ernest Seton- 
Thompson, and a large body of less known votaries. And we 
are bound to feel that this wide and healthy outlook of our 
present literature upon nature and humanity alike, is in reas- 
suring contrast to the narrow, sombre, and introspective char- 
acter of so much of the literature of two hundred years ago. 



APPENDIX 



309 



A CLASSIFIED LIST OF LATE AND CONTEMPORARY 

WRITERS * 

POETS 

THE EAST 

See text for Stoddard, Stedman, and Aldrich. 

Richard Watson Gilder, b. Bordentown, N.*J., 1844. Journaliat 
and reformer. Associate editor and later editor-in-chief of Scribner^s 
Monthly, now The Century. "The New Day," 1875; "Lyrics, and 
Other Poems," 1885; "Two Worlds," 1891; "The Great Remem- 
brance," 1893; etc. 

John Boyle O'Reilly, b. Ireland, 1844; d. Hull, Mass., 1890. 
An Irish revolutionist, transported to Australia, whence he escaped 
to the United States, 1869. Edited the Boston Pilot. Published 
" Songs of the Southern Seas," 1873, and other poems and sketches. 

Lloyd Mifflin, b. Columbia, Pa., 1846. Painter and poet. A 
studious cultivator of the sonnet. "The Hills," 1895; "At the Gates 
of Song," 1897; "The Slopes of Hehcon," 1898; "Echoes of Greek 
Idyls," 1899; "The Fields of Dawn," 1900. 

George Edward Woodberry, b. Beverly, Mass., 1855. Professor 
of English Literature at Columbia University. "The North Shore 
AVatch (a threnody, 1883), and Other Poems," 1890; '"Wild Eden," 
1899. Essays: "Studies in Letters and Life," 1890; "Heart of 
Man," 1899; " Makers of Literature," 1900. 

♦The principle of classification adopted here is for the most part apparent. 
Poets and novelists are subdivided geographically, the miscellaneous writers are 
not. Further, the men are separated from the women. Lastly, in each small 
group the order is chronological, except that in the case of the novelists, because 
of the rapid changes in the character of fiction, the writers born before 1860, both 
men and women, are separated from those born since. A few slight departures 
from exact chronology, made to secure better classification, may be noted, 
especially among the miscellaneous writers. 

311 



312 APPENDIX 

Henry Cuyler Buxner, b. Oswego, N. Y., 1855; d. N. J., 1896. 
Editor of Puck. Author of "Airs from Arcady and Elsewhere," 
1884; "Rowen," 1892; also several volumes of fiction: "The Story of 
a New York House," 1887; " Zadoc Pine and Other Stories," 1891. 

Frank Dempster Sherman, b. Peekskill, N. Y., 1860. Adjunct 
Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. "Madrigals and 
Catches," 1887; "Lyrics for a Lute," 1890; "Little-Folk Lyrics," 
1892. 

Clinton ScoLLARD, b. Clinton, N. Y., 1860. Professor of English 
Literature at Hamilton College. "With Reed and Lyre," 1886; 
" Songs of Sunrise Lands," 1892; " The Hills of Song," 1895; etc. 

George Santayana, b. Madrid, Spain, 1863. Assistant Professor 
of Philosophy at Harvard. "Sonnets and Other Poems," 1894; 
"Lucifer, a Theological Tragedy," 1899; " Interpretations of Poetry 
and Religion" (essays), 1899. 

Richard Hovey, b. Normal, 111., 1864; d. N. Y., 1900. Graduate 
of Dartmouth. Journalist, actor, dramatist, lecturer on English at 
New York, poet. ' ' Seaward' ' (elegy upon the death of Thomas 
William Parsons), 1893; "Songs from Yagabondia" (with Bliss 
Carman), 1893; " Launcelot and Guenevere," a poem in dramas, 
1891-98; "Along the Trail," 1898; " Taliesin: a Masque," 1899. 

Louise Chandler ^IMoulton, b. Conn., 1835. Literary correspond- 
ent and editor. Author of various volumes of poems, stories, and 
essays, from " This, That, and the Other," 1854, to "At the Wind's 
Will," 19u0. 

Celia Thaxter, b. N. H., 1836; d. Appledore Island, 1894. Artist- 
author of poems and sketches of the north-east coast and the Isles of 
Shoals, where her father was a lighthouse keeper. "Among the Isles 
of Shoals" (papers), 1873; "Poems," 1874; "Drift-AVeed," 1878; 
" Poems for Children," 1883. 

Emma Lazarus, 1849-1887. A Jewess of New York, who wrote in 
protest against the persecutions of her race. Author of ' * The Spa- 
gnoletto," a tragedy, 1876, and various poems and translations. 

Edith M. Thomas, b. 0., 1854. A writer of New York City. 
" Lyrics and Sonnets,^' 1887; "The Inverted Torch," 1890; and other 
volumes of verse and prose. 



POETS 313 

Helen Gray Cone, b. New York, 1859. Teacher. " Oberon and 
Pack," 1885; "The Ride to the Lady, and Other Poems," 1891. 

Louise Imogen Guiney, b. Boston, 1861. " Songs at the Start," 1884 
and other poems and essays. 

Doha Read Goodale, b. Mass., 1866. PubUshed, with her elder 
sister, Elaine Goodale, "Apple Blossoms," 1878, and several other 
volumes. Also, separately, "Heralds of Easter," 1887. 

THE SOUTH 

See text for Hayne, Timrod, and Lanier. 

Abram Joseph Ryan, "Father Ryan," b. Norfolk, Va., 1839; d. 
Louisville, Ky., 1886. A Catholic priest, chaplain in the Confederate 
army, and editor of religious periodicals. " The Conquered Banner, 
and Other Poems," 1880. 

John Bannister Tabb, b. Va., 1845. A Catholic priest, and Pro- 
fessor of English Literature at St. Charles College, Md. Served in 
the Civil War. "Poems," 1894; "Lyrics," 1897; "Child Verse," 
1900. 

Samuel MiNTURN Peck, b. Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1854. "Cap and 
Bells," 1886; " Rhymes and Roses," 1895; etc. 

Frank. Lebby Stanton, b. Charleston, S. C, 1857. On the staff of 
the Atlanta Constitution. Author of popular verse, often in dialect. 
" Songs of the Soil," 1894; " Comes One with a Song," 1899. 

Lizette Wood worth Reese, Baltimore, Md. " A Branch of May," 
1887; "A Handful of Lavender," 1891; " A Quiet Road," 1896. 

THE WEST 

See text for Hartb, Miller, Sill, and Field. 

Richard Realf, b. Sussex, England, 1834; d. Oakland, Cal., 1878. 
Steward of Lady Byron; emigrant to Kansas, 1854; one of John 
Brown's followers; soldier in the Union army. Scattering poems, 
"The Children," "Indirection," " Salvete, Milites," etc., were col- 
lected posthumously, 1899. 

John James Piatt, b. Ind., 1835. Served in several official capac- 
ities at Washington, and as U. S. consul at Cork, Ireland. Published 



314 APPENDIX 

at Columbus, Ohio, with W. D. Howells, "Poems of Two Friends," 
1860; also several volumes with his wife, and a number independ- 
ently— ''Western Windows, and Other Poems," 1869; "Idyls and 
Lyrics of the Ohio Valley," 1884; etc. "The Mower in Ohio" is a 
touching idyl worthy of Whittier. 

John Hay, b. Salem, Ind., 1838. Early years spent in Illinois. A 
private secretary of Lincoln; major and brevet colonel in the Civil 
War; editor and diplomat; Ambassador to Great Britain, 1897; Secre- 
tary of State, 1898. "Pike County Ballads," 1871; "Poems," 1890; 
"Life of Abraham Lincoln" (with J. G. Nicolay), 1887. Mr. Hay is 
best known by his poems in homely western dialect, written in his 
earlier years, particularly "Little Breeches," and "Jim Bludso." 

Will Carleton, b. Mich., 1845. Journalist and lecturer. His 
poems are largely in dialect. " Poems," 1871; "Farm Ballads," 1873; 
"Farm Legends," 1875; " City Ballads," 1885; etc. 

Charles Warren Stoddard, b. Rochester, N. Y,, 1843. Resident 
for a time in the Hawaiian Islands. Foreign correspondent of the 
San Francisco Chronicle. Lecturer on English Literature at Notre 
Dame College, Ind., and at the Catholic University, Washington, 
D. C. " Poems," 1867; "South Sea Idyls" (romantic prose), 1873. 

William Rufus Perkins, 1847-1895. Professor at Cornell and at 
the State University of Iowa. " Eleusis and Lesser Poems," 1892; 
"Eleusis," privately printed in 1890, is a long poem, dealing with 
the mystery of life, in the stanza and in the lofty key of " In Mem- 
oriam." 

John Vance Cheney, b. Groveland, N. Y., 1848. Librarian at 
San Francisco and Chicago. "Thistle-Drift, 1887; "Wood-Blooms," 
1888; " Out of the Silence," 1897; etc. 

Edwin Markham, b. Oregon City, Ore., 1852. Teacher in the Cal- 
ifornia schools; resident of Brooklyn since 1899. "The Man with 
the Hoe (1899) and Other Poems," 1900; "Lincoln, and Other 
Poems," 1900. 

James Whitcomb Riley, b. Greenfield, Ind., 1853. Strolling vender, 
sign-painter, actor, journalist. Writer of poetry and prose. "The 
Old Swimmin'-Hole, and 'Leven More Poems," 1883; " Pipes o' Pan 
at Zekesbury," 1889; "Rhymes of Childhood Days," 1890; " Arma- 
zindy," 1894; " Home Folks," 1900; etc. 



POETS 315 

William Vaughn Moody, b. Spencer, Ind., 1869. Instructor in 
English at the University of Chicago. ** The Masque of Judgment," 
1900; "Poems," 1901. 

Paul Laurence Dunbar, b. Dayton, O., 1872. Of African blood. 
Journalist and Librarian. ** Lyrics of Lowly Life," 189G; '* Lyrics 
of the Hearthside," 1899; ''Folk from Dixie" (prose), 1897. 

Saeah Morgan Piatt (Sallie Bryan), b. Lexington, Ky,, 1836. 
Wife of J. J. Piatt. *' A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles," 1874; '* An 
Irish Garland," 1884; " Child- World Ballads," 1887; etc. 

Ina Donna Coolbrith, b. near Springfield, 111. Resident of Los 
Angeles and of San Francisco, and Librarian at Oakland, Cal. **A 
Perfect Day, and Other Poems," 1881; " Songs of the Golden Gate," 
1895. 

Emma Frances Dawson, San Francisco. Music teacher. Her 
patriotic chant royal, "Old Glory," was published as a prize poem 
in John Boyle O'Reilly's Boston Pilot. Her '' Ballade of the Sea of 
Sleep" and a few^ other poems are included in a volume of weird 
tales, ''The Itinerant House," 1896. 

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, b. Wisconsin. ''Drops of Water," 1872; 
"Poems of Passion," 1883; " Poems of Pleasure," 1888; etc. 

CANADA 

Charles G. D. Roberts, b. New Brunswick, 1860. Journalist at 
Toronto and New York; Professor of Literature at King's College, 
Windsor, N. S. "Orion and Other Poems," 1880; "In Divers 
Tones," 1887; " The Heart of the Ancient Wood" (a novel), 1900. 

Archibald Lampman, 1861-1899. Educated at Toronto; held a 
position in the Civil Service at Ottawa. " Among the Millet and 
Other Poems," 1888. 

Bliss Carman, b. New Brunswick, 1861. Journalist, now resident 
of New York. " Low Tide on Grand Pr6," 1893; " Songs from Vaga- 
bondia" (with Richard Hovey), 1894, 1896. 

William Wilfred Campbell, b. Western Ontario, 1861. In the 
government service at Ottawa. "Lake Lyrics," 1889; " Mordred, a 
Tragedy " and " Hildebrand " (dramas in blank verse), 1895; "Beyond 
the Hills of Dream," 1900. 



316 APPENDIX 

Duncan Campbell Scott, b. Ottawa, 1862. In the Civil Service. 
" The Magic House," 1893. 

NOVELISTS 

THE EAST 
See text for Ho"vvells, James, Aldrich, and Miss Wilkins. 
Theodore AVixtheop, b. New Haven, Conn., 1828; killed at Big 
Bethel, Ya., 1861. Traveller, and author of analytical tales. " Cecil 
Dreeme," 1861; ''John Brent," "Edwin Brothertoft," "The Canoe 
and the Saddle," " Life in the Open Air," 1862. 

Fitz-James O'Brien, b. Ireland, 1828; went to New York, 1852; d. 
Md., 1862, from wounds received in the Civil AYar. Author of "The 
Diamond Lens " (in Atlantic Monthly, 1858) and other tales and poems. 

Silas Weir Mitchell, b. Phila., 1829. Physiologist and physician. 
" Hugh Y^ynne, Free Quaker," 1897; " The Adventures of Frangois," 
1898; "Dr. North and His Friends," 1900; also poems and essays. 

Edward Payson Roe, 1838-1888. A Presbyterian clergyman of 
New York State. Author of a score of religious novels: "Barriers 
Bnrned Away," 1872; "From Jest to Earnest," 1875; "A Face 
Illumined," 1878; etc. 

John Habbertox, b. Brooklyn, 1842. Editor. Author of " Helen's 
Babies," 1876, and many other novels; also of the drama, "Deacon 
Crankett." 

Julian Hawthorne, b. Boston, 1846. Son of Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne. Journalist and foreign correspondent. Author of romantic 
tales. "Bressant," 1873; " Archibald Malmaison," 1879; "Sinfire," 
1887; also long novels: " Garth," 1877; "Sebastian Strome," 1880; etc. 

Edgar Fawcett, b. New York, 1847. Author of "The House at 
High Bridge," "Douglas Duane" (1887), and many other stories, 
mostly of New York life; also poems, plays, and essays. 

Arthur Sherburne Hardy, b. Boston, 1847. Graduate of AVest 
Point; Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College; in the U. S. 
diplomatic service. "But Yet a AVoman," 1883; "The Y^ind of 
Destiny," 1886; " Passe Eose," 1889. 

Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, b. Norway, 1848; d. New York, 1895. 
Editor, and Professor of Germanic Languages at Cornell and Columbia. 



NOVELISTS 317 

" Gunnar, a Norse Romance," 1874; *' Ilka on tlie Ilill-Top, and 
Other Stories," 1881; poems, essays, stories for boys, etc. 

Thomas A. Janvier, b. Philadelphia, 1849. Editor; traveller 
through Mexico and the south-west; later, resident in France and 
England. ''Colour Studies," "Stories of Old New Spain," etc. 
** The Aztec Treasure House " and " In the Sargasso Sea" (1898) are 
stories of adventure for boys. 

Edward Bellamy, b. Mass., 1850; d. 1898. Journalist and eco- 
nomist. " Looking Backward," 1888; " Equality," 1897; '' The Duke 
of Stockbridge," 1900; and several earlier w^orks. 

Brander Matthews, b. New Orleans, 1852. Professor of Literature 
at Columbia. "His Father's Son," 1895; " A Confident To-morrow," 
1899; and many, sketches of New York life, essays in dramatic and 
literary criticism, etc. 

Francis Marion Crawford, b. Italy, 1854. Traveller, and author 
of nearly two score novels. " Mr. Isaacs," 1882; " A Roman Singer," 
1884; " Saracinesca," 1887; etc. Also historical w^orks: "Ave Roma 
Immoi-tahs," 1898; " The Rulers of the South," 1900. 

Harold Frederic, b, N. Y., 1856; d. England, 1898. Journalist of 
New York State, and correspondent abroad. Novels chiefly of Amer- 
ican rural life. " Seth's Brother's Wife," 1887; "In the Valley," 
1889; "The Lawton Girl," 1890; "The Copperhead," 1894; ''The 
Damnation of Theron Ware," 1896; "March Hares," 1896; "Gloria 
Mundi," 1898; "The Market-Place," 1899. 

Adeline D. T. Whitney, b. Boston, 1824. Author of novels and 
children's stories. " Faith Gartney's Girlhood," 1863; " We Girls," 
1870; etc. 

Rose Terry Cooke, 1827-1892. Novels and stories of New England 
life, and poema. "Somebody's Neighbors," 1881; " Steadfast," 1889; 
etc. 

Jane G. Austin, 1831-1894; of Massachusetts. Stories of early 
colonial days. "Outpost," 1866; "Cipher," 1869; " Standish of 
Standish"; " Betty Alden"; " A Nameless Nobleman," 1881; etc. 

Louisa May Alcott, 1832-1888. Daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott. 
Writer of stories for children. " Little Women," 1868, 69; "An Old- 



318 APPENDIX 

Fashioned Girl," 1870; "Little Men," 1871; "Eight Cousins," 1875; 
"Jo's Boys," 1886; etc. 

Harriet Prescott Spofford, b. Me., 1835. Romantic tales and 
poems. "Sir Rohan's Ghost," 1859; "The Amber Gods, and Other 
Stories," 1863; "Azarian," 1864; "Xew England Legends," 1871. 

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, b. Mass., 1844. "The Gates 
Ajar," 1868; "The Story of Avis," 1877; "Beyond the Gates," 1883; 
"The Madonna of the Tubs," 1886; "The Gates Between," 1887; 
"Jack the Fisherman," 1887; "A Singular Life," 1895; "Within the 
Gates," 1900; and many other moral and religious novels. 

Blanche Willis Howard, b. Me., 1847; m. Dr. von Teuffel of 
Stuttgart, Wurtemberg, 1890; d. Munich, 1898. "One Summer," 
1875; "Guenn," a Breton romance, 1882; " Aulnay Tower," 1886; etc. 

Sarah Orne Jewett, b. Berwick, Me., 1849. Stories of the north- 
east coast. "Deephaven," 1877; "A Country Doctor," 1884; "A 
Marsh Island," 1885; "The Country of the Pointed Firs," 1896; etc. 

Margaret Deland, b. Pa., 1857. Resident of Boston. "John 
Ward, Preacher," 1888; "Philip and His Wife," 1894. 

Richard Harding Davis, b. Philadelphia, 1864. Journalist and 
foreign correspondent. Writer of short stories. " Gallegher, and 
Other Stories," 1891; "Van Bibber and Others," 1892; "The Princess 
Aline," 1895; "Soldiers of Fortune," 1897; "The King's Jackal," 
1898; "With Both Armies in South Africa," 1900; etc. 

Paul Leicester Ford, b. Brooklyn, 1865. Traveller, and writer in 
the field of history and historical fiction. "The Honorable Peter 
Stirhng," 1894; "The Story of an Untold Love," 1897; "Janice Mere- 
dith," 1899. 

Stephen Crane, b. N. J., 1871; d. Germany, 1900. Joumahst. 
"The Red Badge of Courage," 1896; "The Third Violet," 1899; 
"Wounds in the Rain," 1900; also " War Is Kind" (verse j, 1899. 

Kate Douglas Wiggin (Mrs. Riggs), b. Philadelphia. Interested 
in Kindergarten work. "The Bird's Christmas Carol," 1888; 
"Timothy's Quest," 1890; "Penelope's English Experiences," 1893; 
"Penelope's Progress," 1897; etc. 

Edith Wharton, b. New" York. Several volumes of short stories. 
**The Greater Inclination," 1899; "The Touchstone," 1900. 



NOVELISTS 319 

THE SOUTH 

See text for Cabli and Allen. 

Richard Malcolm Johnston, 1822-1898. Lawyer; teacher in Georgia 
and Maryland. * ' Dukesborough Tales ' ' (originally contributed to the 
Southern Magazine), 1883; ''Old Mark Langston," 1884; "Two Gray 
Tourists," 1885; etc. 

John Esten Cooke, 1830-1886; of Virginia. Lawyer, soldier, poet, 
and romance writer. " The Virginia Comedians," 1854; "Fairfax," 
1868; etc. 

Albion W. Touegee, b. O., 1838. Officer in the Union army, jurist, 
editor, lecturer, U. S. consul. Lived in North Carolina, 1865-1881. 
Legal works and semi-political novels relating to the South. " Figs 
and Thistles," 1879; "A Fool's Errand," 1879; " Bricks Without 
Straw," 1880; " An Appeal to C^sar," 1884. 

Francis Hopkinson Smith, b. Baltimore, 1838. Mechanical en. 
gineer; landscape painter; illustrator. Stories, essays, and character 
sketches. "Colonel Carter of Cartersville," 1891; "A Gentleman 
Vagabond and Others," 1895; "Tom Grogan," 1896; " Caleb West, 
Master Diver," 1898. 

Joel Chandler Harris, b. Ga., 1848. Editor of Atlanta Constitution^ 
"Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings," 1880; "Daddy Jake the 
Runaway " ; " Mr. Rabbit at Home " ; " Tales of the Home Folks ' ' ; etc. 

Thomas Nelson Page, b. Va., 1853. Lawyer and lecturer. "In 
Ole Virginia" (short stories — " Marse Chan," "Meh Lady," etc.), 
1887; " Red Rock" (a novel of the reconstruction period), 1899; etc. 

Frances Hodgson Burnett, b. England, 1849. Removed to Ten- 
nessee, 1865; now resident of Washington, D. C. "That Lass o' 
Lowrie's" (Lancashire), 1876; "Louisiana," 1880; "Through One 
Administration," 1882; "Little Lord Fauntleroy," 1886. 

Mary No AiLLEs MuRFREE ("Charles Egbert Craddock"), b. Tenn., 
1850. "In the Tennessee Mountains" (eight sketches), 1884; "The 
Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains," 1885; "The Despot of 
Broomsedge Cove," 1888; etc. 

Ruth McEnery Stuart, b. La. Writer of short stories. "A Gold- 
en Wedding," 1893; "Carlotta's Intended," 1894; "The Story of 



320 APPENDIX 

Babette, a Little Creole Girl," 1894; "Sonny" (the story of an 
Arkansas boy), 1896; etc. 

Grace King, b. La., 1859. Stories of Creole life. "Monsieur 
Motte," 1888; '' Tales of Time and Place," 1892; " Balcony Stories," 
1893; etc. 

Amelie Rives (Princess Troubetskoy), b. Richmond, Va., 1863. 
"A Brother to Dragons, and Other Old-Time Tales," 1888; "The 
Quick or the Dead," 1888; "Virginia of Virginia"; "Barbara Der- 
ing"; etc. 

Mary Johnston, b. Va., 1870. Tales of Colonial Virginia. 
"Prisoners of Hope," 1898; "To Have and to Hold," 1899; 
"Audrey," 1901. 

Winston Churchill, b. St. Louis, 1871. Graduate of U. S. Naval 
Academy at Annapolis, Md. "The Celebrity," a society sketch, 
1898; " Richard Carvel," a story of Maryland before the Revolution, 
1899; "The Crisis," 1901. 

THE WEST 

See text for Hakte and Mrs. Jackson. 

Lewis Wallace, b. Ind., 1827. Lawyer; lieutenant in Mexican 
War; major-general in Civil War; governor of New Mexico; U. S. 
minister to Turkey. "The Fair God," an Aztec story, 1873; "Ben 
Hur, a Tale of the Christ," 1880; " The Prince of India," 1893. 

Edward Eggleston, b. Ind., 1837. Methodist minister ( "circuit- 
rider" ) in Indiana and Minnesota; editor at Chicago and New York; 
pastor at Brooklyn. "The Hoosier Schoolmaster," 1871; "The Cir- 
cuit Rider," 1874; "The Faith Doctor," 1891; etc. Also several 
school histories. 

Ambrose Bierce, b. Ohio, 1812. Brevetted major in the Civil War. 
Journalist, resident in California. " Tales of Soldiers and Civilians" 
(later title, "In the Midst of Life"), 1892; "Black Beetles in 
Amber" (satires in verse), 1892. 

Captain Charles King, b. Albany, N. Y., 184-1. Served with the 
army in the west; brigadier-general in the war against Spain; served 
in the Philippines. Numerous military novels. "The Deserter," 
1887; "Dunraven Ranch," 1888; "The Colonel's Daughter," etc. 



NOVELISTS 321 

Constance Fenimore Woolson, b. N. H., 1840; d. Italy, 1894. 
Lived at Cleveland, 0. Spent the summers of her girlhood on the 
island of Mackinac and the shores of Lake Superior, Lived also in 
Florida. "Castle Nowhere" (sketches of the Lake region), 1875; 
''Rodman the Keeper" (southern), 1880; ''Anne," 1882; "East 
Angels," 1886; "Jupiter Lights," 1889. 

Mary Hartwell Catherwood, b. O., 1847; resident of Illinois. 
Historical romances of the old North- West. " Craque-o'-Doom," 
1881; "The Romance of Dollard," 1889; "Old Kaskaskia," 1893; 
"The White Islander," 1893; etc. 

Mary Hallock Foote, b. N. Y., 1847. Artist. Resident of Colorado, 
California, and Idaho. " The Led Horse Claim," 1883; " John Bode- 
win's Testimony," 1886; "The Chosen Valley," 1892; "In Exile, 
and Other Stories," 1894; "Coeur d' Al&ne," 1894; "The Prodigal," 
1900. 

Alice French (" Octave Thanet"), b. Mass., 1850. Resident of 
Arkansas- and Iowa. Trans-Mississippi stories. " Knitters in the 
Sun," 1887; "Expiation," 1890; " Stories of a Western Town," 1893. 

Henry Blake Fuller, b. Chicago, 1857. Novels, chiefly of Chi- 
cago hfe. "The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani," 1890; "The Cliff- 
Dwellers," 1893; " With the Procession," 1895; "The Last Refuge " 
(a Sicilian romance), 1900. 

Hamlin Garland, b. AVisconsin, 1860. Educated in Iowa; taught 
in Illinois; farmed in Dakota; lectured in the East. " Main-Travelled 
Roads" (short stories), 1891; "Rose of Dutcher's Cooley," 1895; 
"The Eagle's Heart," 1900. Also " Prairie Songs," 1893, and "The 
Trail of the Gold-Seekers" (prose and verse), 1899. 

Robert Herrick, Associate Professor in the University of 
Chicago; writer of short stories and novels. "The Man Who Wins," 
1896; "Literary Love Letters," 1897; "Love's Dilemma," 1898; "The 
Gospel of Freedom," 1899; "The Web of Life," 1900. 

CANADA. 

Gilbert Parker, b. Canada, 1862. Lecturer in English Literature 
at Toronto; journalist in the South Seas; later resident in England; 
contributor to American magazines. " Pierre and His People," 1892; 
"When Valmond Came to Pontiac," 1895; "The Seats of the 



322 APPENDIX 

Mighty," 1896; " The Pomp of the Lavilettes," 1897; " A Romany of 
the Snows," 1897; "The Battle of the Strong," 1898; and other 
romances. 

MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 

HISTORIANS 

See text for Pabkman and predecessors. 

Henry Charles Lea, b. Philadelphia, 1825. Publisher. " Super- 
stition and Force," 1866; ''Studies in Church History," 1869; "His- 
tory of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages," 1887-88. 

GoLDWiN Smith, b. England, 1823. Professor of Modern History 
at Oxford, 1858-66; at Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N. Y., 1868-71; later 
resident at Toronto. "Irish History and Irish Character," 1861; 
"Civil "War in America," 1866; "Relations Between America and 
England," 1869; " History of the United States," 1893. 

Ulysses S. Grant, b. 0., 1822; d. 1885. Commander of all the 
American armies, 1864; President of the U. S., 1869-77. "Personal 
Memoirs," 1885-86. 

Justin Winsor, 1831-1897. Librarian at Boston and Harvard. 
Editor of "Memorial History of Boston," 1880-81; "Narrative and 
Critical History of America" (8 vols.), 1885-89; "Christopher Colum- 
bus," 1891. 

Andrew Dickson White, b. N. Y., 1832. Professor of History; 
President of Cornell University; U. S. Ambassador to Germany. 
" Warfare of Science," 1876. "The New Germany," 1882. 

Hubert Howe Bancroft, b. 0., 1832. Resident of California. 
Gathered materials for and edited " History of the Pacific States," in 
39 volumes, 1882-90. 

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., b. Boston, 1835. Lawyer and poli- 
tician. " Three Episodes of Massachusetts History," 1892; " Massa- 
chusetts: Its Historians and its History," 1893. 

Henry Adams, b. Boston, 1838. Professor and editor. "John 
Randolph," 1882; " History of the United States" (9 vols.), 1889-91. 

James Schouler, b. Mass., 1839. Historian and legal writer and 
lecturer. "History of the United States Under the Constitution" 
(6 vols.), 1880 ff. 

Alfred T. Mahan, b. West Point, N. Y., 1840. Captain in the 



MISCELLANEOUS WRITEES 323 

navy since 1885. ** Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783," 
1890; "Life of Farragut;" " Life of Nelson," etc. 

John Clark Ridpath, b. Ind., 1841; d. 1900. Professor and editor. 
"Popular History of the United States," "Cyclopedia of Universal 
History," " Great Races of Mankind" (1894), Lives of Garfield, 
Blaine, Gladstone, etc. 

Hermann Eduard von Holst, b. Russia, 1841. Professor in Ger- 
many and at the University of Chicago. " Constitutional and Polit- 
ical History of the United States " (8 vols.), 1876-1892. 

John Fiske, b. Hartford, Conn,, 1842; d. 1901. Lecturer on Phil- 
osophy, Assistant Librarian, and member of the Board of Overseers 
at Harvard. Historian, philosopher, and evolutionist. "Myths 
and Myth- Makers," 1872; "Darwinism," 1879; "The Destiny of 
Man," 1884; "The Beginnings of New England," 1889; etc., etc. 

James Ford Rhodes, b. Cleveland, 1848. " History of the United 
States from the Compromise of 1850," to be completed to 1885 in 
eight volumes. 

Henry Cabot Lodge, b. Boston, 1850. Lawyer and senator. 
"Short History of the English Colonies in America," 1881; "The 
Story of the American Revolution, " "Alexander Hamilton," etc. 

John Bach McMaster, b. Brooklyn, 1852. Civil engineer; Pro- 
fessor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. " A History of 
the People of the United States" (in seven volumes; vols, i-v, 1883- 
1899). 

WooDROW Wilson, b. Va., 1856. Lecturer; Professor of Jurispru- 
dence and Politics at Princeton. " Congressional Government," 
" The States," " Elements of Historical and Practical Politics," etc. 

Theodore Roosevelt, b, N. Y., 1858. Adventurer in the west; 
colonel in the war with Spain; governor of New" York; Vice-President 
of the U. S. " The Naval War of 1812," 1882; " Essays on Practical 
Politics," 1888; "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," 1888; "The 
Winning of the West," 1889; " Oliver Cromwell," 1900; " The Stren- 
uous Life" (essays and addresses), 1900; etc. 

LITERARY HISTORIANS 

Moses Coit Tyler, b. Conn., 1835; d. 1900. Professor of American 
History at Cornell. "History of American Literature from 1607- 



324 APPENDIX 

1765," 1878; "The Literary History of the American Revolution," 1897. 

Thomas R. Louxsbury, b. N. Y., 1838. Professor of EngHsh at 
Yale. "History of tlie English Language," 1879; " James Fenimore 
Gooper," 1882; "Studies in Chaucer," 1891. 

Charles Francis Richardson, b. Maine, 1851. Professor of Eng- 
lish Literature at Dartmouth College. "A Primer of American Lit- 
erature," 1878; "American Literature 1607-1885," 1890. 

Barrett Wendell, b. Boston, 1855. Professor of English at Har- 
vard. "Life of Cotton Mather," 1891; " Stelligeri, and Other 
Essays," 1893; " Literary History of America," 1900. 

PHILOSOPHERS, SOCIOLOGISTS, ETC. 

Elisha MuLFOKD, b. Pa., 1833; d. Mass., 1885. Episcopal clergy- 
man and philosophical writer. "The Xation," 1870; " The Rex)ublic 
of God," 1881. 

MoNCURE D. Conway, b. Va., 1832. Methodist, later L^nitarian, 
clergyman. "The Rejected Stone," 1861; "The Eastward Pilgrim- 
age," 1870; " Christianity, " 1876; " Demonology and Devil-Lore," 

1878. 

William Torrey Harris, b. Conn., 1835. Lecturer at Concord 
School of Philosophy; JJ. S. Commissioner of Education. " Intro- 
duction to the Sttidyof Philosophy," 1889; "Hegel's Logic," 1890; 
" Psychologic Foundations of Education;" etc. 

Edwin Lawrence Godkin, b. Ireland, 1831. Journalist and law- 
yer. Established The Nation; edited The Nation and the New York 
Evening Post. "Government" (in the American Science Series); 
"Problems of Democracy;" "'Unforseen Tendencies of Democracy," 
1898; etc. 

Henry George, b. Philadelphia, 1839; settled in California, 1858; 
d. at New York, 1897. Political economist. "Progress and Pov- 
erty," 1879; "The Land Question," 1883; "Social Problems," 1884; 
etc. 

Francis A. Walker, 1840-1897. Brevetted brigadier-general in 
Civil War; commissioner of Indian affairs; professor at Yale; presi- 
dent of Mass. Inst, of Technology. "The Indian Question," 1874; 
"The Wages Question," 1876; " Money, Trade, and Industry," 1879; 
" Land and Its Rent," 1883; " Political Economy," 1883; etc. 



MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 825 

SCIENTISTS, NATURALISTS, AND TRAVELLERS 

See text for Burroughs. 

John Muir, b. Scotland, 1838. Explorer; discoverer of the Muir 
Glacier, Alaska; writer on the natural history of the Pacific Coast. 
"The Mountains of California," 1894. 

Maurice THOMPSox,b.Ind., 1844; d.l901. Civil engineer, lawyer, state 
geologist, journalist. "By-Ways and Bird Notes," 1885; "Sylvan Secrets 
in Bird-Song and Books," 1887; "MyAVinter Garden," 1900; etc. 
Also poems, and several novels: "A Tallahassee Girl," 1882; "Alice 
of Old Vihcennes," 1900. 

Lafcadio Hearn, b. Ionian Islands, 1850; of Irish and Greek par- 
entage. Resident of New Orleans, New York, and Japan. Essays 
chiefly remarkable for novelty of subject and poetic style. "Stray 
Leaves from Strange Literature," 1885; "Glimpses of Unfamiliar 
Japan," 1894; " Out of the East," 1895; etc. Also several stories: 
"Chita," 1889; " Youma, the Story of a West Indian Slave," 1890; 
etc. 

David Starr Jordan, b. N. Y., 1851. President of the Leland 
Stanford Jr. University; U. S. commissioner in charge of fur seal inves- 
tigations. ''Science Sketches," 1888; " The Story of the Innumera- 
ble Company, and Other Sketches," 1896; "The Care and Culture of 
Men," 1896; "Matkaand Kotik, a Tale of the Mist-Islands," 1897; 
"Footnotes to Evolution" (popular addresses on the Evolution of 
Life), 1898; "Imperial Democracy," 1899. Also poems, and numer- 
ous works in science. 

Charles F. Lummis, b. Mass., 1859. Explorer from Canada to 
Chile, especially among the Indians of southwestern United States 
and Mexico; editor at Los Angeles, Cal. " Some Strange Corners of 
Our Country," 1892; "The Land of Poco Tiempo," 1893; "The 
Awakening of a Nation: Mexico of To-day," 1898; etc. 

Olive Thorne Miller (Mrs. Harriet Mann Miller), b. Auburn, 
N. Y., 1831. " Bird Ways;" " In Nesting Time;" "A Bird-Lover in 
the West," 1894; " Four-Handed Folk," 1896; etc. 

Bradford Torrey, b. Mass., 1843. On the editorial staff of The 
Youth's Companion. "Birds in the Bush; " " The Foot-Path Way," 



326 APPENDIX 

1892; "The Florida Sketch-Book," 1894; ''Spring Notes from Ten- 
nessee," 1896; '*A World of Green Hills," 1898. 

Ernest Evan Seton-Thompson, b. England, 1860. Lived in back- 
woods of Canada, 1866-70; on western plains, 1882-87. Animal 
painter and illustrator; naturalist to the government of Manitoba; 
art student at Paris; resident of New York. *' Birds of Manitoba," 
etc.; "Wild Animals I Have Known," 1898; ''The Biography of a 
Grizzly," 1899; " The Trail of the Sandhill Stag," 1899; etc. 

CRITICAL AND DISCURSIVE ESSAYISTS 

See text for Whipple, Holland, Mitchell, Hale, Higginson, Curtis, Norton, 
Warner, and Stedman. 

William Winter, b. Mass., 1836; resident of Staten Island, N. Y. 
Journalist, orator, poet, and critic. Essays, chiefly in dramatic 
criticism and upon English scenes and life. Poetry: "The Con- 
vent," 1854; "The Queen's Domain," 185S; "Thistledown," 1878; etc. 
Prose: "English Rambles," 1883; " Henry Irving, " 1885; "Shake- 
speare's England," 1886; "Gray Days and Gold," 1891; "The Life 
and Art of Edwin Booth," 1894; etc. 

Laurence Hltton, b. New York, 1843. Merchant, journalist, 
lecturer, dramatic and art critic. "Plays and Players," 1875; 
"Literary Landmarks of London," 1885; " Curiosities of the American 
Stage," 1890; etc. 

Hamilton Weight Mabie, b. N. Y., 1845. Associate editor of The 
Outlook. "My Study Fire," 1890 (second series, 1894); "Essays in 
Literary Interpretation," 1892; "Essays on Nature and Culture," 
1896; "Essays on Books and Culture," 1896; "William Shakespeare, 
Poet, Dramatist, and Man," 1900; etc. 

Robert Grant, b. Boston, 1852. Judge. "The Reflections of a 
Married Man." 1892; "The Opinions of a Philosopher," 1893; "The 
Art of Living," 3895; "Search-Light Letters," 1899. Also various 
novels: "An Average Man," 1884; " Unleavened Bread," 1900. 

Henry VAN Dyke, b. Pa., 1852. Clergyman; Professor of English 
Literature at Princeton. "The Reality of Religion," 1884; "The 
Poetry of Tennyson," 1890; "The Gospel for a World of Sin," 1899; 
"Fisherman's Luck, and Other Uncertain Things," 1899. Also poems 
and stories. 



MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 327 

John Jay Chapman, b. New York, 1862. Lawyer. ''Emerson, and 
Other Essaj^s," 1897; "Causes and Consequences " (political essays), 
1898; ''Practical Agitation," 1900. 

Agnes Repplier, b. Philadelphia, 1859. Lives much in Europe. 
"Books and Men," 1888; "Points of View," 1891; " Essays in Mini- 
ature," 1892; "Essays in Idleness," 1893; "In the Dozy Hours," 
1894; "Varia," 1897. 

Lewis Edwards Gates. Assistant Professor in Harvard Uni- 
versity. Critic and Essayist. "Three Studies in Literature," 1899; 
"Studies and Appreciations," 1900. 

HUMORISTS 

See text for ]\[ark Twain and Stockton. 

Charles Godfrey Leland, b. Phila., 1824. Journalist; industrial 
educator. "Hans Breitmann's Ballads" (in Pennsylvania Dutch 
dialect), 18G8, and many books on gypsy lore, etc. 

David Ross Locke (" Petroleum V. Nasby"), 1833-1888. Satirical 
letters from the "Confedrit X Roads," of political influence during 
and after the Civil War. "The Nasby Papers," 1864; " Swingin' 
Round the Cirkle," 1866; "Ekkoes from Kentucky," 1868; "Nasby 
in Exile," 1882; etc. 

Charles Farrar Browne ("Artemus Ward"), b. Me., 1834; d. 
Englarid, 1867. Printer; lecturer in America and England. " Artemus 
Ward: His Book," 1862; " His Travels," 1865; "In London," 1867; 
"His Panorama," 1869. 

FiNLEY Peter Dunne, b. Chicago, 1867. Editor Chicago Journal. 
"Mr. Dooley in Peace and War," 1898; "Mr. Dooley in the Hearts of 
his Countrymen," 1899. 



CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE* 





A3IERICAN HISTORY 


AMERICAX LITERATURE 


ENGLISH HISTORY AND 
LITERATURE 


1607 

to 

1700 


Landing at James- 
town, 1607 

Dutch trading-post 
o n Manhattan 
Island, 1613 

Landing at Ph^- 
mouth Rock, 
1620 

Harvard College 
founded, 1636 

First printing press 
in America, 1639 

King Philip's War, 
1675 

Salem witchcraft 
trials, 1692 

The incipient re- 
volt against An- 
dros, 1689 


Smith's True Rela- 
tion, 1608 
Strachey's True 

Reportory, 1610 
Bradford and AVin- 

slow'sDiarv,1622 
The Bav Psalm 

Book/1640 
Ward'sSimpleCob- 

bier, 16-17 
Anne Bradstreet's 

Tenth Muse, 1650 
Eliot's A 1 go n kin 

Bible, 1661-63 
Wigg 1 e s w or t h's 

Day of Doom, 

1662 
Mather's Wonders 

of the Invisible 

World, 1693 


James I. reigns, 1003-1625 

Milton born, 1608 

King James version of 

Bible completed, 1611 
Shakespeare died, 1616 
Bacon's Essays, 1625 
Milton's L' Allegro, 1632 
The Common wealth, 1649 
Walton's Complete Ang- 
ler, 1653 
The Restoration, 1660 
Milton's Paradise Lost, 

1667 
Dry den poet laureate, 1670 
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress, 1678-84 
William and Mary reign, 

1689 
Locke's On Human Un- 
derstanding, 1690 


1700 

to 

1765 


Franklin originat- 
ed the Library 
Company of Phil- 
adelphia, 1731 

Washington born, 
1732 

Braddock's defeat, 
1755 

Stamp Act, 1765 


Mather' s Magnalia, 
1702 

The Boston News 
Lett e r e s t a b- 
lished, 170-1 

Se wall's Diary, 
1652-1730 

Poor Richard's Al- 
manac, 1732-? 

Edwards' sFreedom 
of the Will, 1754 

G o d f r e y's The 
Prince of P a r- 
thia, 1758 (writ- 
ten) 


Queen Anne reigns, 1702- 
1714 

Swift's Battle of the 
Books, 1704 

The Spectator, 1711 

Pope's Windsor Forest, 
1713 

Defoe's Robinson Cru- 
soe, 1719 

Swift's GuUiver's Trav- 
els, 1726 

Richardson's Clarissa 
Harlowe, 1748 

Fielding's Tom Jonea, 
1749 

Gray's Elegy, 1751 

Johnson's Dictionary, 
1755 



* This outline is much condensed, (the English part disproportionately so). Only 
such early or important works of a writer are recorded as will sutfice to indicate the 
period of his activity and influence. Minor events in history are occasionally admitted 
when they have some bearing on literature. For instance, the opening of a university 
in the South or the West mav have a significance that the opening of a similar in- 
stitution in the East does not. ^'o class of events is recorded with completeness. 

328 



CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE 



329 



AMERICAN HISTORY 



The Stamp Act Re- 
pealed, 1766 

Battles of Lexing- 
ton and Bunker 
Hill, 1775 

Declaration of In- 
dependence, 1776 

Articles of Confed- 
eration, 1777-81 

The Constitution 
formed, 1787 

Capital at New 
York, 1789; at 
P h i 1 a d e Iphia, 
1790; at Wash- 
ington, 1800 

Vermont, Ken- 
tucky, and Ten- 
nessee admitted 
to the Union 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



The Orators — Otis, 
etc. 

Wool man's Jour- 
nal, 1774 

Trumbull's M' Fin- 
gal, 1775 

Paine' sCrisis, 1776- 
83 

Freneau's Poems, 
1786; 1795 

TheFederalist, 1788 

Franklin's Autobi- 
ography, 1789 

Washington' sFare- 
well Address, 
1796 

Hopkinson's Hail 
Columbia, 1798 



ENGLISH HISTORY AND 
LITERATURE 

George III. reigns, 1760- 

1820 
Goldsmith's Deserted Vil- 
lage, 1770 
Burke's Speech on Amer- 
ican Taxation, 1774 
Gibbon's Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Em- 
pire, 1776 
Cowper's Task, 1785 
White's Selborne, 1789 
Boswell's Johnson, 1791 
Burns' s Poems, 1793 
LyricalBallads, byAVords- 
worth. and Coleridge, 
1798 



Population, 5,000,- 
000 

LouisianrC pur- 
chase, 1803 

Fulton's steamer, 
1807 

The Embargo Act, 
1807 _ 

War with England, 
1812-15 

Florida purchased, 
1819 

Missouri Compro- 
mise, 1820 

"Monroe Doc- 
trine," 1823 

University of Vir- 
giniaopened,1825 

Ohio, Louisiana, In- 
diana. Mississip- 
pi, Illinois, Ala- 
bama, Maine, and 
Missouri admit- 
ted 



Brown' s Romances 
1798-1801 

Barlow's Columbi- 
ad, 1807 

Irving' s Knicker- 
b o c ker, 18 9; 
Sketch-book, 1819; 
Columbus, 1828 

Bryant's Thana- 
topsis, 1817 ;Poems 
1821 

Halleck and 
Drake's Croaker 
Poems, 1819 

Coo per' s Precau- 
tion, 1820 ;TheSpv, 
1821;ThePioneers, 
1823; The Last of 
theMohicans,1826 

Novels of Neal, 
Sedgwick, and 
Paulding 

Dana's Buccaneer, 
1827 

Poe's Tamerlane, 
1827 

Webster's Diction- 
ary, 1828 



Edinburgh Review estab- 
lished, 1802 
Scott's Last Minstrel. 

1805; Lady of the Lake; 

1810; Waverley Novels, 

1814-31 
Bvron's Childe Harold, 

1812-1 8 
Battle of Waterloo, 1815 
Moore's Lalla Rookh, 

1817 
Keats' s Poems, 1817 
Shellev's PrometheusUn- 

bound, 1820 
DeQuincey's Confessions, 

1821 
Lamb's Essays of Elia, 

1822-24 



530 



APPENDIX 





AMERICAN HISTORY 


AMERICAN LITERATURE 


ENGLISH HISTORY AND 
LITERATURE 


1830 


Population, 13,- 


Webster's Reply to 


Tennyson's early poema, 


to 


000,000 


Hayne, 1830 " 


1830 


1840 


TheAmerican Anti- 


Channing's Dis- 


Reform Bill, 1832 




Si a very Society 


courses, 1830 


Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, 




formed, 1831 


Kennedy' s S w a 1- 


1833; French Revolu- 




Nullification Act of 


low Barn, 1832 


tion, 1837 




South Carolina, 


Bryant's Poems, 


Dickens's Pickwick Pa- 




1832 


1833 


pers, 1836-37 




Texas a Republic, 


Irying'sAlhambra, 


Victoria Queen, 1837 




1836 


1833 


Electric Telegraph, 1837 




Arkansas and 


Poe'sMSFoundin 






M i c h i g an ad- 


a Bottle, 1833 






mitted 


Longfellow's Ou- 

tre-Mer, 18 3 3; 

Voices of the 

Night, J 839 
Simms's The Yem- 

assee, 1835 
Willis' sPencillings 








by the Way, 1835 


• 






Emerson's Nature, 








1836 








Holmes's Poems, 








1836 








H a w t h r n e's 








Twice-ToldTales, 








1837 








Whittier's Poems, 








1837; Ballads and 








A n t i - S 1 a V ery 








Poems, 1838 





eiitlONOLOGiCAL OUTLINE 



331 



AMERICAN HISTORY 



Population, 17,- 
000,000 

IndependentTreas- 
iiry Act, 1840 

Univ. of Michigan 
opened, 1841 

Morse Telegraph in 
the U. S., 1844 

War with Mexico, 
1845-48 

Smitlisonian Insti- 
tution organized, 
1846 

Gold discovered in 
California, 1848 

Florida, Texas, 
Iowa, and Wis- 
consin admitted 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



Cooper's Pathfind- 
er, 1840; Deer- 
slayer, 1841 

Dana's Two Years 
Before the Mast. 
1840 

Emerson's Essavs, 
1841-44; Poerns, 
1847 

Lowell's A Year's 
Life, 1841; Big- 
low Papers (first 
series), Fable for 
Critics, and Sir 
Launfal, 1848 

Longfellow's Bal- 
lads, 1841; Evan- 
geline, 1847 

Prescott's Conquest 
of Mexico, 1843 

Margaret Fu ller ' s 
Woman in the 
Nineteenth Cen- 
tury, 1844 

Poe's Raven, 1845 

Hawthorne' sMoss- 
es from an Old 
Manse, 1846 

Taylor's Views 
Afoot, 1846 

Parkman's C a 1 i- 
fornia and Ore- 
gon Trail, 1849 

Thoreau' s Week, 
1849 

Ticknor's Spanish 
Literature, 1849 

Poe died, 1849 



ENGLISH HISTORY AND 
LITERATURE 

Browning's Sordello,1840 

Carlyle's Hero-Worship, 
1841 

Wordsworth poet laure- 
ate, 1843 

Macaulay's Essays, 1843; 
H i s t o ry of England, 
1848-60 

Ruskin's Modern Paint- 
ers, 1843-60 

Repeal of Corn Laws, 
1846 

Thackeray's Vanity Fair, 
1847-48 

Mill's Political Economy, 
1848 



332 



APPENDIX 





AMERICAN HISTORY 


AMERICAN LITERATURE 


ENGLISH HISTORY AND 
LITEKATCRE 


1850 


Population, 23,- 


Webster's Seventh 


AVordsworth died, Ten- 


to 


000,000 


of March Speech, 


nyson poet laureate, 


1860 


The Omnibus Bill, 


1850 


1850; In Memoriam, 




( inc luding the 


Hawthorne's Scar- 


1850 




Fugitive Slave 


let Letter, 1850; 


Crimean War, 1854-56 




Law), 1850 


Houseof the Sev- 


MatthewArnold's Poems, 




Kansas - Nebraska 


en Gables, 1851; 


1855 




Bill, 1854 


Blithedale Ro- 


Mrs. Browning's Aurora 




Astor Librarv (N. 


mance, 1852 


Leigh, 1856 




Y.City) and Bos- 


Emerson's Repre- 


George Eliot's Clerical 




ton Public Libra- 


sentative M e n. 


Life, 1858; Adam Bede, 




ry opened, 1854 


1850 


1859 




Dred Scott Decis- 


Mitchell's Reveries 


Darwin's Origin of Spe- 




ion, 1857 


of a Bachelor, 


cies, 1859 




Lincoln -Do uglas 


1850 


Macaulav, D e Q u i ncey 




debate, 1858 


Stowe's Uncle 


died, 18.59 




John Brown's raid. 


Tom's Cabin, 






1859 


1852 






California, Minne- 


Choate's Eulogy on 






sota, andpregon 


Webster, 1853 






admitted 


Thoreau's Walden, 
1854 

Havne's Poems, 
1855 

Irving' s Washing- 
ton, 1855-59 

Longfellow's Hia- 
watha, 1855 

Whitman' s Leaves 






, 


of Grass, 1855 








Curtis' s Prue and 


- 






I, 185fi 








Motlev's Dutch Re- 








public, 1856 








Holland's Titcomb 








Letters, 1858 








Holmes's Autocrat, 








1858 








Cooper, Webster, 








Irving, Prescott 








died. 





CHEpNOLOGICAL OUTLINE 



333 





AMEKICAN UISTORT 


AMEKICAX LITERATURE 


ENGLISH HISTORY AND 
LITERATURE 


1800 


Population, 31,- 


Hawthorne's Mar- 


George Eliot's Silas 


to 


000,000; number 


ble Faun, 18()0 


Marner, 1801; Romola, 


1870 


of slaves, 4,000,- 


Emerson' sConduct 


1803 




000 


of Life,1800;May 


Spencer's First Princi- 




Secession of South 


Day, 1807 


ples, 1802 




Carolina, 1860 


Timrod's Poems, 


Huxlev's Man's Place in 




Civil War, 1861-65 


1800 


Nature, 1803 




Emancipation 


Holmes'sElsieVen- 


Newman's Apologia, 1864 




Proclamation, 


ner, 1801 


Arnold's Essays in Crit- 




1803 


Julia Ward Howe's 


icism, 1805-88 




A s s a ssination of 


Battle Hymn of 


Dickens's Our Mutual 




Lincoln, 1865 


the Republic, 


Friend, 1805 




Thirteenth Consti- 


1801 


Swinburne's Poems and 




tutional Amend- 


Winthrop's Cecil 


Ballads, 1800 




ment, 1865 


Dreeme, 1801 


Parliamentarv R e f o rm 




Vassar Co liege 


Longfellow's Tales 


Bill, 1807 




opened, 1805 


of aWavside Inn, 


Browning's Ring and the 




Atlantic cable per- 


1803 


Book, 1808 




manently laid, 


Lowell's Commem- 


Morris's Earthly Para- 




1806 


oration Ode, 1805 


dise, 1808 




Purchase of Alas- 


Whitman's Drum 


Gladstone Prime Minis- 




ka, 1867 


Taps, 1805 


ter, 1808 




L^niversity of the 


AMiittier's S n o v\^- 


Mrs. Browning, Thack- 




South open ed, 


Bound, 1806 


eray, Landor died 




1868 


Bret Harte's Con- 






First Pacific rail- 


densed Novels, 






road, 1809 


1867 






Kansas, West Vir- 


Longfellow^'sTrans- 






ginia, Nevada, 


lation of the Di- 






and Nebraska ad- 


vina Commedia, 






mitted 


1867 

S i 1 1's Hermitage, 
1867 

Miss Alcott's Little 
Women, 1868 

Hale's Man With- 
out a Country, 
1868 

Aldrich's Story of 
a Bad Bov, 1869 

Mark Twain's In- 








nocents Abroad, 
1809 
Winthrop, Thor- 
eau, Everett died 





334 



APPENDIX 



1870 

to 

1880 



AMERICAN HISTORY 



Population, 39,- 
000,000 

Re CO 11 st ruction 
completed. 1S70 

University of INIich- 
igan opened to 
women, 1870 

Civil Service Re- 
form Act, 1871 

Chicago fire, 1871 

Financial crisis, 
1873 

Centennial Exposi- 
tion at Philadel- 
phia, 1876 

Railroad riots, 1877 

Yellow fever epi- 
demic, 1878 

Resumption of spe- 
cie payment, 1879 

Colorado admitted 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



Bryant's t r ansla- 
tion of tne Iliad, 
18 70; of the 
Odyssey, 1871-72 

Bret Harte's Luck 
of RoaringCamp, 
1870 

Lowell's Among 
My Books, 1870 

Taylor's t rans la- 
tion of first part 
of Faust, 1870 

Eggleston's Hoos- 
i e r Schoolmas- 
ter, 1871 

Burroughs' s Wake- 
Robin, 1871 

Miller's Songs of 
the Sierras, 1871 

Ho wells' s Their 
Wedding Jour- 
ney, 1871 

Fiske's Myths and 
Myth Makers, 
1872 

Aldrich's Marjorie 
Daw, 1873 

Stedman's Victori- 
an Poets, 1875 

Mark Twain's Tom 
Sawyer, 1876 

Lanier's Poems, 
1876 

White's Warfare of 
Science, 3876 

James's Daisy Mil- 
ler, 1878 

Cable's Old Creole 
Days, 1879 

Stockton's Rudder 
Grange, 1879 

S i m m s, Motley, 
Bryant, Taylor 
died 



ENGLISH HISTORY AND 
LITERATURE 



Rossetti's Poems, 1870 
Huxlev's Lay Sermons, 

1870" 
Darwin's Descent of Man, 

1871 
Dobson's V i g n ettes in 

Rhyme, 1873 
Pater's Studies in the 

Renaissance, 1873 
Stephen's Hours in a Li- 
brary, 187-4 
Froude's Julius Caesar. 

1876 
Hardy's Return of the 

Native, 1877 
Meredith's The Egoist, 

1879 
Anti-rent agitation, 1879 
Dickens, Kingsley died 



CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE 



^35 



AMERICAN HISTORY 



Population, 50,- 
000,000, growing 
to 7(3,000,000 

Civil Service Re- 
form Bill, 1883 

Inter - State Com- 
merce Act, 1887 

Catholic Universi- 
ty, Washington, 
opened, 1890 

TnternationalCopy- 
right Act, 1891 

World's Fair at 
Chicago, 1893 

Klondike Excite- 
ment, 1897 

Spanish -American 
War, and acqui- 
sition of Porto 
Rico and the 
Philippines, 1898 

Annexation of Ha- 
waii, 1898 

Troubles in China, 
1900 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



Cable's The Grand- 
issimes, 1880 

George's Progress 
and Poverty, 1880 

Harris's Uncle Re- 
mus, 1880 

Howells's A Mod- 
ern Instance, 
1882;Rise of Silas 
Lapham, 1885 

Helen Fiske Jack- 
son's Ramona, 
1884 

MarkT wai n' sH uck- 
leberryFinn,188-i 

Parkman's Mont- 
calm and Wolfe, 
1884 

Stedman's Poets of 
America, 1885 

Lowell's Democra- 
cy, 1886 

Mary E. Wilkins's 
Humble Ro- 
mance, 1887 

Whitman' sNovem- 
ber Boughs, 1888 

Fiske's Beginnings 
of New England, 
1889 

Field's Little Book 
of Western Verse, 
1890 

Holmes's Over the 
Tea-cups, 1890 

Curtis's Orations 
and Addresses, 
1893-94 

Lowell's Letters, 
1893 

Holland, L a n i er, 
Emerson, Long- 
fellow, Mrs. Jack- 
son, Sill, Lowell, 
Curtis, AVhittier, 
Whitman, Park- 
man, Holmes, 
Mrs. Stowe died 



ENGLISH HISTORY AND 
LITERATURE 

Lang's Ballades in Blue 
China, 1880 

Stevenson's V i rginibus 
Puerisque, 1881 ; Treas- 
ure Island, 1883 

Tennyson'sLocksleyHall, 
Sixty Years After, 1886 

Bryce's American Com- 
monwealth, 1888 

Kipling' sPlainTales from 
the Hills, 1888; Ballads, 
1892 

Watson's Wordsworth's 
Grave, 1890 

Barrie's Little Minister, 
1891 

Austin noet laureate, 1895 

AVar in^South Africa, 1899 

Queen Victoria died, 1901 

GeorgeEliot,Carlyle, Dar- 
win, Rossetti, Arnold, 
Browning died, (1880- 
89) 

Newman, Tennyson, 
Froude, Pater, Steven- 
son, Morris, Ruskin 
died, (1890-1900) 



REFERENCES 

HISTORY AND CRITICISM 

A Literary History of America. Barrett Wendell. A complete sur- 
vey, biographical and critical, exclusive of writers still living in 1900. 
(Scribner. ) 

American Literature: 1607-1885. Charles F. Richardson. Critical 
only. Inclusive of living writers. (Putnam. ) 

A History of American Literature Baring the Colonial Time, 1607-1765. 
Moses Coit Tyler. Biographical and critical, with liberal extracts. 
Exhaustive and indispensable for the careful study of the early period. 

(Putnam.) 

Tlie Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783. Moses 
Coit Tyler. A continuation of the above. (Putnam.) 

Poets of America. Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1885. Critical, with 
special chapters on Bryant, Whittle r, Emerson, Longfellow, Poe 
Holmes, Lowell, Whitman, and Taylor. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) 

National Studies in American Letters. Edited by G. E. Woodberry. 
A series of volumes treating American authors in groups: "Old 
Cambridge," T. W. Higginson; "Brook Farm," Lindsay -Swift; "The 
Clergy in American Life and Letters," D. D. Addison; "The, 
Hoosiers," M. Nicholson. Others in preparation: "The Knicl^er- 
bockers," H. van Dyke; "The American Historical Novel," P. L. 
Ford; "Southern Humorists," J. K. Bangs; "Flower of Essex," G. 
E. AVoodberry. 

SELECTIONS 

Library of American Literature. Stedman and Hutchinson. In 
eleven volumes; both poetry and prose, of all periods; the only easily 
accessible collection of specimens from the early period. Contains 
also, in the last volume, brief biographical notices. 

An American Anthology. Edmund C. Stedman. Specimens of 
American poetry from 1787 to 1900. Intended to accompany the 

336 



REFERENCES 337 

critical volume, ''Poets of America." The minor poets are freely 
represented, about six hundred names being included. Contains 
also brief biographical notices. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) 

American Prose. Edited by G. R. Carpenter. Selections from twenty- 
five representative authors from Cotton Mather to Parkman (living 
authors not included), with critical introductions by various writers. 
— (Macmillan.) 

Cyclopaedia of American Literature. E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck. 
Two large volumes; revised edition, 1875. Extended personal and 
critical notices, with liberal selections. Criticism somewhat anti- 
quated. Most useful for biographies and selections from the works of 
early or less important and even quite forgotten writers. 

Library of Poetry and Song. William Cullen Bryant. Selections 
from British and American poets; also translations. Published 1870. 

Selections and sometimes entire works of standard authors may be 
found in inexpensive form in the " Lake English Classics;" '' River- 
side Literature Series;" and " Cassell's National Library" (paper). 

BIOGRAPHY 

There are standard and authorized biographies of the following 
writers: 

Alcott, Louisa M. Life, Letters, and Journals, by Mrs. E. D. Cheney. 

Bryant. By Parke Godwin, 2 vols. 

Channing, Dr. Wm. E. By W. H. Channing. 

Dana, R. H., Jr. By C. F. Adams. 

Edwards, Jonathan. By A. V. G. Allen, in American Religious 
Leaders series. 

Emerson. Memoir, by J. E. Cabot, 2 vols. Emerson in Concord, 
by E. W. Emerson. 

FranUin. Life, by Jared Sparks, 1844; by James Parton, 1864. 

Halleck. Life and Letters, by J. G. Wilson. 

Haivthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, by Julian Haw- 
thorne, 2 vols. 

Holmes. Life and Letters, by J. T. Morse, Jr., 2 vols. 

Irving. By Pierre M. Irving, 3 vols. 

Longfellow. By Samuel Longfellow, 3 vols. 

Lowell. Letters, edited by C. E. Norton, 2 vols. 

Mather, Cotton. By Barrett Wendell. 



338 APPENDIX 

Motley. Correspondence, edited by G. W. Curtis. 

OssoU, Margaret Fuller. Memoirs, by Emerson, Channing., and 
Clarke. 

Parkman. By C. H. Farnham. 

Paulding. Literary Life, by AV. I. Paulding. 

Payne, John Howard. Life and Writings, by Gabriel Harrison. 

Prescott. By George Ticknor. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. By C. E. Stowe. 

Taylor. Life and Letters, by Marie Hansen Taylor and H. E. 
Scudder, 2 vols. 

Thoreau. By W. E. Channing. 

Whitman. By K. M. Burke. 

Whittier. Life and Letters, by S. T. Pickard, 2 vols. 

Special series of biographies are as follows: 

American Men of Letters. Edited by C. D. Warner. Biographies 
of Bryant, Cooper, Curtis, Emerson, Franklin, Hawthorne (in prep- 
aration), Irving, Longfellow (in preparation), Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 
Poe, Prescott (in preparation), Kipley, Simms, Taylor, Thoreau, Noah 
Webster, Whittier (in preparation), Willis. 

Great Writers Series. Somewhat shorter biographies than the above, 
mostly by British authors, and containing extensive bibliographies. 
The series includes Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Thoreau, 
Whittier. Of Hawthorne there is a biography also in the English 
Men of Letters Series. 

Beacon Biographies. Very brief lives of eminent men, among them 
the following American authors: Agassiz, Phillips Brooks, Cooper, 
Emerson, Grant, Hawthorne, Jefferson, Lowell, Thomas Paine, 
Daniel Webster, and Whittier. 

GENERAL REFERENCE 

Appleton^s Cyclopsedia of American Biography, 6 vols. Concise 
accounts of all Americans of note, living or dead. 

Allibone's Dictionary of Authors. A complete list of authors, titles, 
and dates of publications. The supplement is brought up to 1891. 

Adams' (0. F.) Dictionary of American Authors. Very brief sketclies 
of 6,000 American authors. Names, dates, and titles of chief books 
(without dates). Recent. 



REFERENCES 339 

Who's Who in America. Edited by J. AV. Leonard, 1899-1900. Brief 
sketches of 8,600 living Americans. Useful especially for the latest 
writers. 

WhitcomV s Chronological Outlines of American Literature. A care- 
fully arranged table of important authors, books, and dates, up to 
1894. 

Further references will be found in the following study lists and 
exercises. In these lists the general histories will be referred to by 
the names of their authors — Wendell, Richardson, Tyler, and Duyc- 
kinck (1875 edition). Other abbreviations are: 

L. A. L. Stedman and Hutchinson's " Library of American Liter- 
ature." 

A. A. Stedman' s ''American Anthology." 

L. P. S. Bryant's " Library of Poetry and Song." 

A. P. Carpenter's " American Prose." 

A. M. L. '' American Men of Letters Series." 

G. W. S. " Great Writers Series." 



SUaGESTIONS FOR READING AND STUDY 

I. The Colonial Period 

For the history of the period consult Lodge's " EngUsh Colonies in 
America" and Fiske's " Beginnings of New England." For a brief 
survey of the literature, see chapter xxi, of G. P. Fisher's " Colonial 
Era," in the American History Series. Read Tyler, chapter i. ; Rich- 
ardson, pp. 16-23; AVendell, 26-34. A graceful sketch of the period, 
with interesting engravings, may be found in D, G. Mitchell's 
" American Lands and Letters," chapters i. and it. 

Captain John Smith. The best edition of Smith's works is in 
" Arber's Reprints." Life, by C. D. Warner. Criticism: Jameson's 
" Historical Writing in America," pp. 4-13; Tyler; Richardson. 

Read "The General History of Virginia," Book III., chapter ii. 
(" Arber," IL, 391-403); or the following selections: " L. A. L.," I., 
3-6, 10-17; Tyler, chapter ii. Collateral reading: "To Have and to 
Hold," by Mary Johnston (Atlantic Monthly, 1899-1900). 

William Bradford, Samuel Sewall, etc. Bradford's " History of Ply- 
m.outh Plantation " and Sewall' s "Diary" are both published in 
the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Criticism: 
C. F. Adams's " Massachusetts: Its Historians and Its History." 

Read the following selections: " L. A. L," L, 93-94, 29l/300-301; 
IL, 189, 192-194, 248-254. Collateral reading: Mrs. Hemans's " Land- 
ing of the Pilgrims;" Longfellow's "Courtship of Miles Standish;" 
Mrs. Stowe's '"' The Mayflower;" Mrs. J. G. Austin's historical novels, 
" Standish of Standish," '' Betty Alden," etc. ; Hawthorne's " Grand- 
father's Chair," part I., chapters ii.,iii.,vi.,viii. ;Whittier's " Prophecy 
of Samuel Sewall;" Lowell's essay, "New England Two Centuries 
Ago." 

Poetry. Read " L. A. L.," I., 314-315, IL, 495; Wendell, 38-41; 
"Love well's Fight," Duyckinck, L, 444. 

Theology, etc. Read "L. A. L.," L, 192-195, 251-253, 276-278. 

340 



SUGGESTIONS FOR READING AND STUDY 341 

Cotton Mather. Life, by Barrett Wendell, in " Makers of America 
Series." Criticism: Barrett Wendell's " Stelligeri," 114-118; Jame- 
son's " Historical Writing in America," 46-60. 

Read selections in •' L. A L.," 11. , 140-142; or in '' A. P." Collat- 
eral reading: Hawthorne's ** Grandfather's Chair," IT., iv., v.; Whit- 
tier's "The Garrison of Cape Ann;" Longfellow's ''The Phantom 
Ship" (cp. Mather's account, "A P.," p. 6). 

Jonathan Edwards. Life, by A. V. G. Allen, in " American Re- 
ligious Leaders Series." 

Read " L. A. L.," II., 373-375; or " A. P.," 16-18. Collateral read- 
ing: Holmes's "Pages from an Old Volume of Life," chap. xi. 

John Woolman. Woolman's "Journal," edited by Whittier. 
Read Whittier' s Introduction, pp. 1-4, and chapter i. See Lamb's 
" A Quaker's Meeting," in " Essays of EUa." 

Find, in any of these early writers, an eloquent passage, a bit of 
imaginative description, a flash of wit, or a line of real poetry. Who 
were the great English poets between 1650 and 1750? English essay 
writers? What famous religious allegory was written in England in 
this period? What famous book for boys? 

II. Transition: Benjamin Franklin 

The fullest biography of Franklin is that by James Parton, in two 
volumes; others are by McMaster, in "A. M. L.," by Morse, in 
"American Statesmen Series," and by P. L. Ford—" The Many-Sided 
Franklin," first printed serially in The Century,''^ 1898-99. The best 
edition of the " Autobiography" is that edited by Bigelow, in 3 vols., 
1868 (with additional matter, 1874). Inexpensive reprints (tf earlier 
editions may be found in the " Lake English Classics " (in prepa- 
ration), Cassell's " National Library," etc. "Poor Richard's Al- 
manac" is printed in the " Thumb-Nail Series." 

Read Parton' 8 " Life," IL, viii., 647-655. Read " L. A. L.," IIL, 
15, 17-21, 26-29; or "A. P.," 36-47. The whole of the "Autobiog- 
raphy " should, if possible, be read. Study chapter two (or chapters 
one and two) for revelations of Franklin's ready helpfulness, his 
practical turn of mind, his willingness to experiment, his inclina- 
tion to moralize, and other traits of character. Was he brave? Was 
he modest? Was he honest? Was he too frugal to be generous, or 
too generous to be frugal? Wha* did he read? Examine the chapter 



342 APPENDIX 

also for examples of homely Saxon language, and for words used in 
an old or strange sense. Gather a number of Poor Richard's maxims 
and commit a few to memory. See the poem by Franklin in "L. P. S." 

III. The Reyolutioxary Period 

Read Tyler's "Literary History of the American Revolution," Vol. 
I., pp. 1-12; Richardson, pp. 30-53; Wendell, II., vii. and viii. For 
special authors, see Tyler's "Three Men of Letters" (Berkeley, 
Trumbull, and Barlow); Mitchell's " American Lands and Letters." 
History: John Fiske's "American Revolution," 2 vols.; A. B. Plart's 
" Formation of the Union" (Epochs of American History); Lives 
of Hamilton, Jefferson, etc. Selections: " L. A. L. ;" "A. P." (from 
"Washington, Paine, and Jefferson); Duyckinck; D. J. Brewer's 
"World's Best Orations," 10 vols.; F. Moore's" American Elo- 
quence," 2 vols.; F. Moore's "Songs and Ballads of the American 
Revolution" (1856); Eggleston's "American War Ballads and Lyrics." 
Collateral reading: Pierpont's "Warren's Address;" Longfellow's 
"Paul Revere's Ride;" Emerson's "Concord Hymn;" Cooper's 
"Spy;" Dr. S. W. Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne;" Winston Churchill's 
"Richard Carvel." 

Prose. Compare the language of the Declaration of Independence 
or of the Federalist papers with that of Paine's "The Crisis" 
("A. P.," 70) or of Franklin's '" Autobiography." Read Washington's 
"Farewell Address," paragraphs 1-14, ("L. A. L.," HI., 162; 
" World's Best Orations," X., 3740); Jefferson's "Letters," " L. A. 
L.," III., 274, etc. Also Crfevecoeur's "Letters from an American 
Farmer," Duyckinck, L, 185; "L. A. L.," IIL, 138. 

Poetry, Philip Freneau. Read " The Yankee's Return from Camp " 
and "The Ballad of Xathan Hale," Duyckinck, L, 480, " L. A. L.," 
IIL, 338, 347; Hopkinson's "Battle of the Kegs," Duyckinck, L, 
228, " L. A. L.," IIL, 244; Freneau' s " Eutaw Springs," " The Wild 
Honeysuckle," and "To a Honey Bee," Duyckinck, I., 355, 360, 
"L. A. L.," IIL, 148, 453, 456. 

IV. The New Enyironment 

Charles Br ockden Brown. Read Warner's "Irving," chapter i., 
" A. M. L. ;" also the article on Brown in the " Encyc. Britannica." 
There is a life of Brown by Prescott in Sparks's " American Biog- 



SUGGESTIONS FOR READING AND STUDY 343 

raphy;" also a memoir prefixed to " Wieland" (Brown's "Works," 
6 vols., Philadelphia), and an essay on Brown in Prescott's " Miscel- 
lanies." 

Read the selections in " A. P.," 89-100 (or " L. A. L.," Vol. IV.), 
and note that the author, in spite of his involved way of thinking 
and his inflated language, has yet a directness and even swiftness of 
manner that compels attention and at times fascinates. 

Irving. There are many editions of Irving' s works. One of the 
best is the Geoffrey Crayon edition in 27 volumes, containing the 
biography by Pierre M. Irving in 3 volumes (Putnam). The 
''Knickerbocker History " may be had in Cassell's National Library, 
2 vols. See also the "Lake English Classics;" Life, by C. D.Warner, 
in " A. M. L." Criticism: Eulogy, by W. C. Bryant, in Bryant's 
"Prose Works;" "A Fable for Critics," by Lowell. 

Read "Knickerbocker History," Book III., chapter i. ; "Sketch- 
Book"— "The Author's Account of Himself," " Rip Van Winkle," 
"The Christmas Dinner," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow;" 
"Alhambra" — "The Court of Lions." Illustrate, from Irving and 
Franklin, the difference between humor and wit. What qualities are 
seen in Irving that were lacking in the Puritans? How wide-em- 
bracing in his love of beauty? What directions does his interest in 
English literature take? Does his style seem antiquated? How does 
the ordinary modern novel differ from one of Irving' s sketches? 

Collateral reading: Longfellow's poem, " In the Churchyard at 
Tarrytown." 

Cooper. Household edition of Cooper's works, with introductions 
by Susan F. Cooper, 32 vols. ( Houghton, Mifflin and Co. ) "The 
Last of the Mohicans" ("Lake English Classics, " Scott, Foresman 
and Co.) Life, by T. R. Lounsbury, in "A. M. L." "A Glance 
Backward," by Susan F. Cooper, Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 1887. 
" Chronicle and Comment," The Bookman, Oct., 1899. 

Read "The Pioneers," chapters iii. and xxviii.; "The Deerslayer," 
chapter xvi. ; "The Pilot," chapters i. to iv.; or better, "The Last of 
the Mohicans" entire. Compare Cooper with Scott and determine 
from your own point of view whether American or European themes 
yield the greater interest. Estimate the relative proportions of 
description, narration, and dialogue, in each writer. Find examples of 
Cooper's moralizing. Does Cooper mean to present Natty Bumppo 



344 APPENDIX 

as an ideal character? Test for yourself the charge that Cooper's 
style is hasty and faulty. 

AUston, Brake, Halleck, Willis, etc. "Life and Letters of Halleck," 
by James G. Wilson. Life of Willis, by Beers, in "A. M. L." 

Most of the poems named in the text may be found in Duyckinck, 
"L. A. L.," "A. A.," or ''L. P. S." Read Drake's " Culprit Fay." 
Do you find anything in it derived from the poet's observation— any- 
thing that could not have been learned from other poetry? How 
does it compare in metre, music, and imagery with Lowell's " Vision 
of Sir Launfal?" Do you find in any of Willis's poetry a genuine 
love of nature? 

Collateral reading: Lowell's "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" 
(Prose Works, Riverside ed., Vol. I., 72-76, on AUston); Lowell's 
"Fable for Critics " and Poe's "Literati " (on Halleck and AVillis); 
Whittier's poem, " Fitz-Greene Halleck." 

Bryant. Bryant's works are published by D. Appleton and Co., 
of New York (poems, 2 vols., prose, 2 vols. ; Household edition of 
poems, 1 vol.). Life, by Parke Godwin, 2 vols.; by Bigelow, in "A. 
M. L." "Bryant and his Friends," by James G. Wilson. Criticism: 
Stedman's "Poets of America;" J. Alden's " Studies in Bryant," in 
Literature Primer Series; Whipple's " Literature and Life;" Lowell's 
"Fable for Critics." 

Select three poems in blank verse, and three in rhyme, for study. 
Contrast " Thanatopsis" with the opening pages of Keats' s " Endy- 
mion," written about the same time. Which seems the more youthful? 
Which has the more color and melody? Which, if either, is the more 
devout? What examples do you find in the former of conventional 
poetic diction? Does Bryant's poetry in general show clearly the 
inspiration of a new land? Is it equally clear that the new land is 
America and no other? Could "Thanatopsis " have been written in 
Australia? In England? In London? Trace any similarities be- 
tween Bryant and Cooper. Read "My Tribute to Four Poets" in 
Walt Whitman's "Specimen Days." 

V. Romance 

Poe. Stedman and Woodberry's critical edition of Poe's works, 
10 vols. Selections from "Poe's Tales" in the "Lake English 
Classics" (in preparation;; Life, by G. E. Woodberry, in "A. M. L." 



SUGGESTIONS FOR READING AND STUDY 345 

Criticism: Stedman's "Poets of America;" "Poe's Place in Amer- 
ican Literature," by H. W. Mabie, in Atlantic Monthly, Dec, 1899. 

Read " Tlie Fall of the House of Usher," '* Ligeia," " The Masque 
of the Red Death," ''The Gold-Bug," and "A Descent into the 
Maelstrom;" also the important poems as indicated in the text. Can 
a moral purpose be detected in any of these tales? What is their 
source of interest? Is conversation much used, or naturally used? 
Is any character or any act viewed in the light of right or wrong? 
Compare Poe with Cooper in this respect. Select a passage particu- 
larly beautiful for the scene described or for the language used. Com- 
pare the metre of "The Raven" with that of Mrs. Browning's 
*'Lady Geraldine's Courtship" (1844) and Tennyson's "Locksley 
Hall " (1842)— (read Poe's essay, " The Philosophy of Composition "). 
What other American poet employed refrains effectively? In what 
other familiar p^em is a trochaic measure used? Find among Poe's 
poetry a light-hearted poem; a poem without the first personal pro- 
noun. Find a line that can be aptly quoted apart from its context. 

Collateral reading: *' Poe's Cottage at Fordham," by J. H. Boner, 
and Sonnets by Sarah Helen Whitman, in "A. A." 

From South to North. " Life of Simms," by W. P. Trent, in "A. 
M. L." (see also " Southern Literature," by Louise Manly). ''Life 
of R. H. Dana, .Ir.," by C. F. Adams. 

Read "Two Years Before the Mast" (or at least chapters iv., v., 
xiii., xiv. ). Selections also from Simms, Melville, and Judd may 
be read; they can be found in Duyckinck or " L. A. L." 

Hawthorne. Works, Riverside edition, 13 vols. Separate volumes 
and selections inconvenient form in the "Lake English Classics," 
"Riverside Literature Series," etc. Life, by James, in "A. M. 
L ;" by Conway, in " G. W.^S.;" by Annie Fields, in " Beacon Biog- 
raphies." "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife," by Julian 
Hawthorne. "Memories of Hawthorne," by Rose Hawthorne 
Lathrop. Criticism: "Yesterdays with Authors," J. T. Fields; 
"Essays Theological and Literary," R. H. Hutton; "A Study of 
Hawthorne," G. P. Lathrop; "The New England Poets," W. C. 
Lawton. 

Read " The Snow Image" (and the preface to that volume). Read 
"Ethan Brand," and trace some of the sources of the tale in the 
"American Note-Books" for 1838, July 26 to September 7. Read 



346 APPENDIX 



"The Old Manse." From what does "The Celestial Railroad" 
derive its form ? What in the religious tendency of the times in- 
spired Hawthorne to write it? Is it seriously meant? Find other 
allegories in Hawthorne. What are the best characters in "The 
House of the Seven Gables"? What is the chmax of that story? 
Read " The Custom House" (introduction to "The Scarlet Letter"). 
Was Hawthorne's experience of life either broader or deeper than 
Poe's? Did he turn it to better account in his work? 

Cohateral reading: Longfellow's poem, "Hawthorne;" Alcott's 
sonnet, "Hawthorne," in "A. A." 

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Life, by Mrs. James T. Fields. 
Read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in part or entire. In what ways did 
the institution of slave-holding hinder or help literature ? 

VI. The Transcendental Move3Ient 

Religion and Philosophy in New England. Read Wendell, Book V., 
Chapters iv. and v. References: " Our Liberal Movement in The- 
ology," by J. H. Allen. " Life of Dr. Channing," by W. H. Channing. 
"Transcendentalism in New England," by 0. B. Frothingham. Essays 
on "Transcendentalism" by E. Dowden (-'Studies in Literature" ) and 
R. W. Emerson ("Nature, Addresses, and Lectures"). Frothingham's 
" Life of Ripley," in "A. M. L." " Brook Farm," by Lindsay Swift 
(National Studies in American Letters). "Brook Farm," by J. T. 
Codman. "Life of Margaret Fuller," by T. W. Higginson, in "A. 
M. L." "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli," by Emerson and 
others. 

On Margaret Fuller ("Miranda" ) and Alcott, see Lowell's "Fable for 
Critics." Read the first part of Lowell's essay on "Thoreau." 
Poems of Channing, Very, and Cranch may be found in "L. A. L.," 
"A. A.," and "L. P. S." Very's complete "Poems" have been 
edited by J. F. Clarke. Collateral reading: Hawthorne's " BHthe- 
dale Romance;" Emerson's Address on "Theodore Parker;" Whit- 
tier's poem on "Channing;" Lowell's "Elegy on the Death of Dr. 
Channing;" Alcott's sonnets on "Channing" and "Margaret Ful- 
ler" (in "A. A."). 

Emerson. Works, Riverside edition, 12 vols. " A Memoir of 
Ralph Waldo Emerson," by J. E. Cabot. " Emerson in Concord," 
by E. W. Emerson. "Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings, 



SUGGESTIONS FOR READING AND STUDY 347 

and Philosophy," by G. W. Cooke. Biography of Emerson, by 
O. W. Holmes,' in "A. M. L.;" by Richard Garnett, in " G. W. 
S." Essays by Matthew Arnold ("Discourses in America"), J. J. 
Chapman ("Emerson, and Other Essays"), E. C. Stedman ("Poets 
of America"). 

The best essays of Emerson to begin with are " The American 
Scholar," "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," and some of the simpler 
essays like "Manners" and "Gifts." For the poetry, begin with 
the poems of nature — "May-Day," " Woodnotes," " The Titmouse," 
etc. Are the truths in "The American Scholar" applicable to all 
scholars? Why are they addressed to American scholars? Do Amer- 
icans particularly need encouragement to self-reliance? Distinguish 
between self-reliance and self-assurance. Is the doctrine of compen- 
sation likely to make men inactive and indifferent to success or prog- 
ress? What do you understand by the Over-Soul? Do you judge 
Emerson's reading to have been wide? What waiters does he refer 
to most frequently? Compare his list of Representative Men with 
Carlyle's Heroes ("Heroes and Hero Worship"). Compare one of 
his paragraphs with one of Bacon's, and note similarities and differ- 
ences of style. Commit to memory several of his aphorisms. Com- 
pare his "Threnody" with Pierpont's "My Child" ("A. A."). 
What truths do you find in " Each and All"? What is the central 
truth? What qualities appear in Emerson's poetry that were not in 
Bryant's? 

Collateral reading: "Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson;" 
Lowell's essay, "Emerson the Lecturer;" "Homes and Haunts of 
Emerson," by Sanborn, in Scribner^s, Feb., 1879; " Birds and Poets," 
by John Burroughs; "The Great Stone Face," by Hawthorne 
("Twice Told Tales"); "A Visit to R. W. Emerson," and "By 
Emerson's Grave," in Walt Whitman's " Specimen Days." 

Thoreau. Works, Riverside edition, 11 vols. Life, by F. B. San- 
born, in " A. M. L." " Familiar Letters of Thoreau," edited by F. 
B. Sanborn. "Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist," by William Ellery 
Channing. "Thoreau, His Life and Aims," by H. A. Page. Essays 
on Thoreau by Emerson ("Lectures and Biographical Sketches"), 
Lowell ("Among My Books"), T. W. Higginson ("Short Studies of 
American Authors"), John Burroughs ("Indoor Studies"), R. L. 
Stevenson ("Familiar Studies of Men and Books"). 

Read Walden, chapters on "Economy" and "Sounds." A variety 



348 APPENDIX 

of selections may be found in "A. P." What traits of the Puritan 
do youfindinThoreau? Discuss Stevenson's statement that "Thoreau 
was a skulker." Discuss Burroughs's declaration that Thoreau's 
humor** had worked a little— was not quite sweet." What of his 
resourcefulness? His acuteness and accuracy as an observer? His 
acuteness and soundness as a reasoner? Why is he more widely 
read to-day than he was fifty years ago? 

Collateral reading: Miss Alcott's poem, " Thoreau's Flute," and 
Channing's "Tears in Spring," in *' A. A." (The description of the 
** forest seer" in Emerson's " Woodnotes " fits Thoreau admirably, 
but it was written before Emerson knew Thoreau and therefore 
could not have been intended, as commonly supposed, to describe 
him.) 

YII. National Life and Culture 

Oratory. "Life of Webster," by G. T. Curtis. Lives of Webster, 
Clay, Lincoln, etc., in the "American Statesmen Series." Specimen 
orations in F. Moore's "American Eloquence," 2 vols.; D. J. 
Brewer's "The World's Best Orations," 10 vols. Criticism: Whip- 
ple's "Character and Characteristic Men;" Emerson's "Life and 
Letters in New England;" Wendell's "Literary History of America." 

Read the first three extracts from Webster's speeches and the three 
addresses of Lincoln in "A. P.," comparing them carefully in matter 
and style. 

Collateral reading: Higginson's "Cheerful Yesterdays;" Choate's 
"Eulogy on Webster;" Hawthorne's "Great Stone Face" ("Old 
Stony Phiz"); Whittier's "Ichabod," "The Lost Occasion," and 
" Sumner;" Longfellow's " Charles Sumner," and " Three Friends of 
Mine" (Felton, Agassiz, and Sumner); Lowell's sonnet on "Wendell 
Phillips;" Alcott's sonnet on the same (in "A. A."). 

History and Criticism. "Life of Prescott," by Geo. Ticknor. " Mem- 
oir of Motley," by O. W. Holmes. "Motley's Correspondence," ed- 
ited by G. W. Curtis. "Life of Parkman," by C. H. Farnham. The 
last named is of especial value. Criticism: Whipple's " Essays and 
Eeviews" and "Recollections of Eminent Men;" Jameson's "His- 
tory of Historical Writing in America." 

ReadParkman's "California and Oregon Trail," chapters xiv.-xvii.; 
or the selections from Prescott, Motley, and Parkman in "A. P." 
Collateral reading: Mrs. Gather wood's romances. 



SUGGESTIONS FOR READING AND STUDY 349 

Longfellow. Works, Riverside edition, 11 vols. Cambridge edition 
of poems, with notes, 1 vol. Life, by Samuel Longfellow, 3 vols. ; by 
Robertson, in * 'G. W. S. ' ' Critici sm : ' * Longfellow, " by G. W. Cur- 
tis, Harper^ s Magazine, June, 1882; "The Art of Longfellow," by H. 
E. Scudder, " Men and Letters;" Stedman's "Poets of America." 

Special reading in Longfellow scarcely needs to be indicated; select- 
ed poems may be found in the "Riverside Literature Series" and 
elsewhere. Poems contributing to his own biography are: "Footsteps 
of Angels," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," "To the River Charles," 
"The Two Angels," "My Lost Youth," "The Children's Hour," 
''Three Friends of Mine," " Morituri Salutamus." Arrange Long- 
fellow's important poems under three heads: dramatic, narrative, 
and lyric. How wide ii the scope of the lyric poems ? Could any 
be readily set to music? Find a poem of nature with no moral 
in it; a poem of human life with no touch of outdoor nature in 
it; a sad poem; a poem for scholars; an allegory. What is dac- 
tylic hexameter verse? What is a sonnet? Does Longfellow reflect 
clearly his New England environment? How does his Americanism 
compare with Irving' s? With Bryant's? With Emerson's? In what 
respects is he superior, and in what inferior, to Bryant and to Poe? 

In connection with "Evangeline," read Hawthorne's "Grand- 
father's Chair," IL, viii. Read the "Death of Longfellow," in Walt 
Whitman's "Specimen Days." 

Whittier. Yv^'orks, Riverside edition, 7 vols. Cambridge edition of 
poems, with notes, 1 vol. Life and Letters, by S. T. Pickard, 2 vols. 
Biography, by F. H. Underwood. Criticism: George Woodberry, in 
the Atlantic Monthly, November, 1892; "Stelligeri," by Barrett Wen- 
dell; Stedman's "Poets of America;" Lowell's "Fable for Critics." 

Select for study one of Whittier' s best narrative poems or ballads, 
one poem on freedom, one on nature, and one religious. Contrast, 
as idyls, "Snow-Bound" and "Evangeline" (noting construction, 
spontaneity, truth of delineation, etc.). Compare "The Tent on the 
Beach" with Longfellow's "Tales of a Wayside Inn." What New 
England poet does Whittier most resemble in simplicity of thought? 
What one in simplicity of form? On what ground, if any, could he 
be called the national poet of America? What serious objections are 
there to this use of the title? In what vital point does the resem- 
blance between Whittier and Burns fail? 

Collateral reading: Poems by Holmes and Elizabeth Stuart 



^^0 APPENDIX 

Phelps in the Atlantic Monthly, November, 1892; Longfellow's -The 
Three Silences of Molinos;" Holmes's two poems " On Whittier's 
Birthday;" the dedication of Bayard Taylor's "Lars." 

Loivell Works, Eiverside edition, ] 2 ^-Dls. Cambridge edition of 
poems 1 vol Selections in ''Lake English Classics," Riverside 
Literature Series, "A. P.," etc. Biographical sketch by F H 
Underwood (a full biography is in preparation by H. E Scudder)' 
^ Letters "edited by Critfcism: Stedman's 

Poets of America;" A\ilham Watson's ''Excursions in Criticism" 
( Lowell as a Critic"); Whipple's " Outlooks on Society " 
wiT"^' *^^ following poems : "Sir Launfal," "She Came and 
Went,' "To the Dandelion," "Under the Willows," "The Present 
Crisis," parts of the "Biglow Papers," and "Commemoration Ode " 
Of the prose, read: " My Garden Acquaintance" and " On a Certain 
Condescension in Foreigners " (the critical prose and " Democracv " 
are better postponed). Compare " The Courtin' " with Fessenden's 

Country Courtship " in Duyckinck. Compare " After the Burial" 
with Emerson's "Threnody." Point out unevenness of execution 
m The Commemoration Ode." What is an ode? Compare with 
the odes of the English Cowley. Read a page of Lowell's prose three 
or four times and see if you cannot discover something new-a refer 
ence, an idea, a twist of thought or phrase,-each time. Can Lowell 
be called a lover of the mediaeval, hke Irving and Longfellow? Do 
his European culture and his American common sense mix well? 
(Compare Emerson.) Trace the compliments to Lowell in Holmes's 

?° wK-17^^T^' ^"'''" Lowell." Discussthe justice of the estimate 
m Whittier's lines, "James Russell Lowell." 

Collateral reading: "James Russell Lowell and His Friends " by E 
E. Hale; "A Personal Retrospect," by W. D. Howells, Scribncr's Mag- 
azine, September, 1900; Longfellow's "The Herons of Elmwood." 

mimes. Works. Riverside edition, 13 vols. Cambridge edition of 
poems, 1vol. Selections in Modern Classics, Riverside Literature 
Series, etc. Life and Letters, by John T. Morse, Jr., 2 vols Criti 
cism : Stedman's "Poets of America;" Curtis's "Literarv andSocial 
Essays; Haweis's "American Humorists;" Lawton's "PoetsofNew 
England," 

Read "The Last Leaf," "Dorothy Q.," "The Deacon's Master 
piece, and "The Chambered Nautilus." Read the introduction to 
the collected poems, " To my Readers. " Does Holmes's sentiment 



SUGGESTIONS FOR READING AND STUDY 351 

often take on a melancholy cast? Does it ever degenerate into senti- 
mentalism? Is he a conservative, or a radical, in thought? In form, 
which is he? Read the following autobiographical passages: "The 
Poet at the Breakfast Table," pp. 10-32 (Riverside ed. ) ; "A Mortal 
Antipathy," pp. l-32;'Tages from an Old Volume of Life,"pp. 239-259; 
Introductions to *'The Autocrat" and "Over the Tea-Cups. "Is "The 
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" well named? Does it contain any 
real conversation? In which does the humor most approach wit, 
Lamb or Holmes? Whose humor is of the higher order, Lowell's 
or Holmes's? "Which personality is the more pleasing? 

Collateral reading: " Old Cambridge," by T. W. Higginson; 
"James Russell Lowell and His Friends," by E. E. Hale. Specimens 
of English "society verse" may be found in Locker-Lampson's 
"Lyra Elegantiarum." 

Minor Poetry and Miscellaneous Prose. Hale's works. Library 
edition, 10 vols. Higginson's works, Riverside edition, 7 vols. 
Taylor's Poems, 1 vol.. Dramatic AVorks, 1 vol. (Houghton, Mifflin 
and Co.); Novels and Travels, 16 vols. (Putnam). " Life and Letters 
of Bayard Taylor," by Marie Hansen-Taylor and H. E. Scudder, 2 
vols "Life of Taylor," by Smyth, in " A. M. L." Criticism: 
Stedman's " Poets of America." " Life of Curtis," by Cary, in "A. 
M. L." Curtis's "Orations and Addresses," ed. by C. E. Norton. 

Read Read's "Drifting;" Boker's "Dirge for a Soldier;" Taylor's 
"Bedouin Song;" Holland's " Babyhood" (all in " L. P. S." and "A. 
A."). Compare "The Voyage" (chapter i.) in Taylor's "Views 
Afoot" with "The Voyage " in Irving's " Sketch-Book. " Read the 
selections in "A. P." from Curtis's " Duty of the American Scholar." 
Collateral reading: Longfellow's poem, " Bayard Taylor;" Sidney 
Lanier's poem, " To Bayard Taylor," 

Walt Whitman. "Leaves of Grass" (poems complete), 1 vol. 
" Prose Works," 1 vol. " Selections from the Poems of Walt Whit- 
man," by Arthur Stedman. (All published by David McKay, Phila- 
delphia.) Biography and Criticism: "Life," by William Clarke 
(London); by R. M. Burke. "AYhitman: A Study," by John Bur- 
roughs. "Walt Whitman the Man," by Thomas Donaldson. 
Essays by J. A. Symonds, in "Essays Speculative and Sugges- 
tive," and Edward Dowden, in "Studies in Literature." 

In "Specimen Days," read "Paumanok," "Printing Office," 
** Broadway Sights," "Opening of the Secession War," "Battle of 



352 APPENDIX 

Bull Run" (compare Irving Bacheller's "Eben Holden," chap, xxxix.), 
*'The Oaks and I," "Nature and Democracy." What other American 
writers never married and never went abroad? Has the latter fdct 
affected their "Americanism"? Read "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," 
"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "Beat! Beat! Drums!" 
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "0 Captain, My Cap- 
tain," "AVhispersof Heavenly Death," "The Mystic Trumpeter," 
"Joy, Shipmate, Joy." Compare "The First Dandelion" with 
Lowell's "To the Dandelion." Which poem says most or suggeits 
most? Which is the more natural, simple, spontaneous? For 
imagination and lyric rapture, compare "To the Man-of- War-Bird " 
with Bryant's "To a Waterfowl" and Shelley's "Skylark." Com- 
pare "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" with Clough's "In a 
Lecture Room." Find, in Whitman's poems, metrical lines, espec- 
ially dactj'lic hexameters. Is his "Spirit That Formed This Scene" 
a satisfactory answer to the charge that his poems lack art? Can 
Whitman be said to be preaching the same fundamental doctrine as 
Emerson? 

yill. Poetry in the South 

Read Richardson, Vol. I., 58-60; Wendell, VI. ill. 

Hayne's Complete Poems, with life, 1882. Timrod's Poems, Memo- 
rial edition, 1899. Lanier's Poems, with memorial by William Hayes 
Ward, 1892. "Select Poems of Sidney Lanier," by Morgan Callaway. 
"Selections from the Southern Poets," by W. L. Weber, Macmillan's 
Pocket Enghsh Classics. "Bugle Echoes," ed. by F. F. Browne, 1886. 
"Southern Literature," by Louise Manly. "Pioneers of Southern 
Literature" (Ticknor, Timrod, Hayne), by S. A. Link. Stedman's 
" Poets of America." 

Read the poems indicated in the text, or the selections to be found 
in "L. P. S." or "A. A." In particular, Lanier's " Hymns of the 
Marshes," "Corn," and "The Symphony" should be read. See also 
"June Dreams in January." Compare Lanier's " Song of the Chat- 
tahoochee" with Tennyson's " The Brook." Study the landscape and 
music effects in " The Marshes of Glynn." What is the faith formu- 
lated in " Acknowledgment " ? 

IX. Prose and Poetry in the West 

For selections, see " L. A. L." and "A. A." Biographical and 
critical helps to the study of living writers are necessarily scant. A 



SUGGESTIONS FOR READING AND STUDY 353 

variety of articles, though httle that is final, may be found in the 
files of magazines through Poole's Index. A few of the letters of E. 
R. Sill have been published in the volume of his prose. See '' The 
Literary Emancipation of the West," The Forum, XVL, 156; also 
"Mississippi Valley Literature,'^ in Walt Whitman's "Specimen 
Days;" " The Hoosiers," by M. Nicholson, in " National Studies in 
American Letters. ' ' 

Suggestions for discussion: The humor of Bret Harfce; the serious- 
ness of Mark Twain; Huckleberry Finn's ideas of honor. How far 
does romantic idealism, as found in "Ramona," enter into Harte's 
stories? Does it enter into Mark Twain's at all ? Discuss Eugene 
Field as a poet of childhood and as a poet for children. 

X. Poetry and Criticism in the East 

For selections, see " L. A. L." and "A. A." The Letters of Emily 
Dickinson have been published, and they are quite as original and 
suggestive as her poems. Mr. Stedman's critical work should be 
already familiar. The introduction to his *' American Anthology" 
may be profitably read in this connection. 

Suggestions for discussion: The American boy in literature (see 
Aldrich, Twain, Warner, Ho wells); the best books for children (Miss 
Alcott, Mrs. Burnett, Jacob Abbott, etc.). Consider late writers upon 
outdoor subjects and the varying degree of human interest in their 
writings. Has New York overtaken New England in literary pro- 
ductivity? (Consider writers, magazines, publishing houses, univer- 
sities, libraries, etc.) May differences in the quality of product still 
be observed? Has journalism worked to the detriment of scholar- 
ship? 

XI. Late Movements in Fiction 

For selections from the elder writers, see " L, A. L." Consult 
W. D. Howell's "Criticism and Fiction," Marion Crawford's "The 
Novel: What It Is," and Hamlin Garland's "Crumbling Idols;" also 
"Two Principles in Recent American Fiction," by James Lane 
Allen, Atlantic Monthly, October, 1897. 

The short stories of Bret Harte may be contrasted with Poe's tales, 
or the stories of Miss Wilkins with Hawthorne's tales, to bring out 
the difference between the romantic and the realistic methods. An 
attempt might profitably be made to classify the most popular novels 



354 APPENDIX 

of the last few years according as they are realistic or romantic in 
their tendency ; according as they are delineations of past life (his- 
torical), of present life (realistic again, or " local"), or of purely im- 
aginary scenes; and according as they are novels of plot and incident 
(in the short story, situation), novels of character, or novels of pur- 
pose (moral, didactic, "problem" novels). This will at least serve 
to bring out the nature and extent of the present activities in the 
field of fiction. Further discussion might turn upon the best short 
stories, the long novels most likely to live, and the characters in 
American fiction that are sufficiently well known to permit of refer- 
ence to them without explanation. 



INDEX 



Note. — The number of the page on which the author or subject is specially 
treated is in each case given first ; passing references follow. Names of Ameri- 
can authors are printed in small capitals. Names of foreign authors are printed 
in ordinary lowercase, and have dates attached. British authors are distin- 
guished from other foreign authors by the addition of first names. All titles are 
printed in italics. Only the more important titles are indexed. 



Abbott, Jacob F., 147. 
Abbott, John S. C, 187, 191. 
Adams, Charles Fkancis, Jr., 322, 

28, 305. 
Adams, Hexry, 322, 305. 
Adams, John, 40. 
Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), 17, 

36, 77. 
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 277. 
^schylus (b. c. 525-456), 253. 
Agassiz, Jean Louis (ag^a see), 

136, 162, 177, 192, 239. 
Alcott, Amos Bronson (awFcut), 

155, 135, 153, 154, 170. 
Alcott, Louisa M., 317. 
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (awV- 

drich), 287, 288, 239, 252, 289, 

295, 296. 
Alhambray The, 71. 
Allen, James Lane, 303, 304. 
Allston, Washington, 94, 97, 242. 
America, 231, 243. 
American Flag, Tlie, 94. 
American Scholar, The, 160, 216. 
Among My Books, 222, 227-229. 
Among the Hills, 214. 
Arabian Nights, 353. 
Ariosto (1474-1533), 141. 
Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888), 124, 

210,' 211, 229. 
Arsenal at Springfield, 201. 
Arthur Mervyn, 57, 59. 
Atlantic Monthly, 221, 213, 222, 

232-234, 249, 287, 296. 



Austin, Jane G., 317. 

Autobiography of Benjamin Frank- 
lin, 35, 30, 32, 103. 

Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 
233-236, 241. 

Backlog Studies, 251. 

Bacon, Francis (1561-1626), 17, 
126, 164, 179. 

Balzac (1799-1850), 86, 90, 144. 

Bancroft, George, 187, 133, 153. 

Bancroft, Hubert H. , 322. 

Barclay of Ury, 209, 210. 

Barlow, Joel, 44, 45. 

Battle Hymn of the Republic, 243. 

Battle of the Kegs, 44. 

Bay Psalm Book, 18, 22. 

Beecher, Henry Ward, 150, 162, 
186. 

Bellamy, Edward, 317. 

Ben Bolt, 248. 

Bible, The, 101, 205, 258. 

BiERCE, Ambrose, 320. 

Biglow Papers, 218, 219, 222, 226. 

Bird, Robert M. , 127. 

Bismarck (L815-1898), 181. 

Bitter-Sweet, 249. 

Black Cat, The, 121. 

Blair, Robert (1699-1746), 102, 

Blithedale Romance, 134, 135, 138. 

Boccaccio (1313-1375), 60. 

Boker, George Henry, 244-5, 
246, 247, 289. 

Bossuet (1627-1704), 181. 

Boston News Letter, 19. 



355 



356 



INDEX 



BOYESEN, H. H., 316. 
Bracebridfje Hall, 70. 
Bradford, William, 22. 
Bradstreet, Anne, 23, 230. 
Br onte, Ch arlotte ( 1816-1 855 ) , 294. 
Brooks, Maria Gowen, 99, 111. 
Brooks, Phillips, 186. 
l/ Brown, Charles Brockden, 55- 

61, 53, 54, 77, 111, 126, 141, 142, 

264, 294. 
Browne, Charles Fahrar, 327, 

278. 
Browning,Mrs.E.B.(1806-1861),99. 
Browning, Eobert (1812-1889), 

106. 
Bryant, William Cullen, 100- 

110,54, 55, 84, 86, 93, 97, 98, 

191, 200, 202, 203, 213, 214, 221, 

224, 231, 233, 239, 241, 244, 247- 

249, 251, 254. 
Buccaneers, The, 97. 
Building of the Ship, 197, 201. 
Bulwer, Edward (Lord Lytton, 

1803-1873), 118, 294. 
BuNNER, Henry C., 312. 
Bunyan, John (1628-1688), 31, 

231. 
Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), 40, 

41, 181. 
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 319. 
Burns, Eobert (1759-1796), 96, 

195, 205, 210, 212, 214, 226. 
Burns, 210. 

Burroughs, John, 290, 291 ,252, 308. 
BusHNELL, Horace, 150, 186. 
Butler, Nicholas M., 306. 
Butler, Samuel (1612-1680), 43. 
Byron, Lord (1788-1824), 70, 71, 

96, 113, 206. 
Cable, George W., 302, 303. 
Calhoun, John C, 183-4. 
California and Oregon Trail, 1 89. 
Campbell, Thomas (1777-1844), 

47, 96. 
Campbell, William W. , 315, 306. 
Carleton, Will, 314. 
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 

151, 158, 162, 165, 169, 181, 213, 

222, 227, 229, 256, 263. 



Carman, Bliss, 315, 306. 
Carolina, 272. 
Cary, Alice, 248. 
Cary, Phoebe, 248. 
Cathedral, The, 226. 
Catherwood, Mary H., 321, 304. 
Century, The, 250, 291. 
Cervantes (1547-1616), 141. 
Chambered Nautilus, The, 236, 240. 
Channing, Dr. AVilliam Ellery, 

150, 153, 186. 
Channing, William Ellery, 155, 

153, 171, 173. 
Channing, William Henry, 153, 

154. 
Chapman, John J. , 327. 
Charlotte Temple, 56. 
Chateaubriand (1768-1848), 17, 86. 
Chaucer, Geoffrey (? 1340-1400), 

64, 200, 202, 222. 
Cheney, John Vance, 314. 
Chivers, Thomas Holly, 117. 
Choate, Rufus, 184. 
Choir Invisible, The, 304. 
Churchill, Winston, 320. 
Cicero (b. c. 106-43), 40, 181. 
Clarke, James Freeman, 150, 

153 231. 
Clay,' Henry, 183, 206, 209, 254. 
Clemens, Samuel L., 277-279, 89, 

280, 284, 296, 301, 304. 
Clifton, William, 48. 
Coleridge, Samuel T. (1772-1834), 

94, 95, 97, 126, 141, 151, 158, 

225. 
Collins, Wilkie (1824-1889), 119. 
Colonel Carter of Cartersville, 301. 
Colombiad, The, 45. 
Commemoration Ode, 222, 226, 239. 
Common Sense, 42. 
Concord Hymn, 158, 239. 
Condensed Novels, 281. 
Cone, Helen Gray, 313. 
Confucius (b. c. 550-478), 168. 
Conquest of Granada, 70. 
Conway, MoncureD., 324.* 
-Cooke, John Esten, 319, 301. 
Cooke, Rose Terry, 317. 
Coolbrith, Ina D. , 315. 



INDEX 



35? 



Cooper, James Fenimoee, 77-93, 
54, 61, 62, 63, 95, 100, 107, 108, 
111, 127, 128, 129, 188, 191, 193. 
198, 221, 248, 254, 284, 294. 

Cosmopolitan, The, 296. 

Cotton, John, 26, 27. 

Cotton Boll, The, 272. 

Courtship of Miles Standish, 190, 
198. 

Cowper, William (1731-1800), 231. 

''Ceaddock, Charles Egbert," 

see IMURFEEE. 

Cranch, Christopher P. , 155, 153, 

154, 247. 
Crane, Stephen, 318. 
Crawford, F. Marion, 317. 
Crisis, The, 42. 
Culprit Fay, The, 95. 
Cummins, Maria S. , 147. 
Curtis. George William, 250-51, 

154, 162, 235, 242, 249, 267. 
Dana, Charles A., 154, 249. 
Dana, Richard Henry, 97, 93, 

111, 249. 
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. , 128, 

129, 156, 189. 
Darxte (1265-1321), 108, 199, 203, 

222, 243, 247, 253. 
Darwin, Charles R. (1809-1882), 

230. 
Davis, Richard Harding, 318. 
Dawso.^j, Emma Frances, 315. 
Day of Doom, 23. 
Declaration of Independence, 40, 39. 
Deerslayer, 86. 
Defoe, Daniel (1661-1731), GO, 

118, 157. 
Deland, Margaret, 318, 300. 
Democracij, 223, 229. 
Democratic Vistas, 256, 257. 
Demosthenes (b. c. 384-322), 40, 

181. 
De Quincey, Thomas ( 1785-1859) , 

164, 229. 
Descent into the Maelstrom, 119. 
Dial, Tlie, 153, 155, 162, 169, 221. 
Dickens, Charles (1812-1870), 88, 

121 143 280 294. 
Dickinson, Emily, 288, 289, 284. 



Dixie, 248. 

Dorothy Q., 237, 240. 

Dowden, Edward (1843 ), 256. 

Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859 ), 

119. 

Drake, Joseph Rodman, 91-96, 
54, 97, 98, 111, 231. 

Drayton, Michael (1563-1631), 195. 

Dream I/ife, 244. 

Drum- Taps, 256, 262. 

Dryden, John (1631-1700), 17. 

Dunbar, Paul L., 315. 

Dunne, Finley P., 327. 

Dutchman's Fireside, The, 62. 

Dwight, Timothy, 43, 44, 45. 

Ebers (1837-1898), 129. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 29, 32, 37. 
38, 61. 

Eggleston, Edward, 320, 304, 305. 

Eleonora, 114. 

Eliot, Charles William, 306. 

Eliot, George (1819-1880), 294. 

Eliot, John, 19. 

Elsie Venner, 237. 

Ely, Richard T., 306. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 155- 
168, 64, 108, 126, 130, 134, 136, 
146, 152-154, 169, 170, 173, 174, 
176, 179, 181,184, 213, 214,216, 
221, 222, 225, 226, 229, 232-234, 
237-239, 242, 246, 252, 256, 259, 
260, 261. 263, 264, 268, 283, 308. 

Emmett, Daniel D. , 248. 

Endymion, 195. 

English, Thomas D., 248. 

Essays of Emerson, 162-165. 

Evans, Augusta J., 302. 

Evangeline (e van^ je lin), 196. 

Everett, Edward, 184, 73, 162, 
186, 250. 

Fahle for Critics, 220, 129. 

Fall of the House of Usher, 122. 

Farewell Address of Washington, 40. 

Fawcett, Edgar, 316. 

Federalist, The, 42. 

Felton, Cornelius C, 192. 

Fernald, Chester B., 304. 

Field, Eugene, 284, 285. 

Fields, James T., 190, 222. 



358 



INDEX 



Fireside Travels, 222, 229. 
FiSKE, John, 323, 305. 
Flaubert (1821-1880), 297. 
Flood of Years, The, 110. 
FooVs Prayer, The, 283. 
FooTE, Mary Hallock, 321, 304. 
Ford, Paul L.. 318. 
Foster, Stephen C, 248. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 32-37, 30, 

39, 53, 103, 126, 165, 187, 260, 

262, 277. 
Frederic, Harold, 317. 
Freedom of the Will, 30, 38. 
Freeman^ s Oath, The, 18. 
French, Alice, 321, 304. 
Freneau, Philip (fre no''), 45-48, 

93, 208, 239. 
Fuller, Henry B., 321, 304. 
Fuller, Margaret, see Ossoli. 
FuRNESs, Horace Howard, 306. 
FuRNivALL. Frederick James, 306. 
Garland, Hamlin, 321, 304. 
Garrison, William Lloyd, 185, 

186, 205, 206, 219. 
Gates, Lewis E. , 327. 
General History of Virginia, 20. 
Gentleman^ s Magazine, 114. 
George, Henry, 324. 
Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794), 100. 
Gilder, Richard Watson, 311, 

291. 
Gladstone, William E. (1809- 

1898), 181, 230. 
Godfrey, Thomas, 24, 306. 
Godkin, Edwin L., 324, 306. 
Godwin, William (1756-1836), 58, 

118, 126. 
Goethe (1749-1832), 196, 247. 
Gold Bug, The, 119. 
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-1774), 

74, 77, 107, 212. 
Goodale, Dora and Elaine, 313. 
GouGH, John B,, 162. 
Graham's Magazine, 114. 
Grant, Robert, 326, 307. 
Grant. UlysscsS., 322, 239. 
Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), 231. 
Greeley, Horace, 154, 249. 

GrISWOLD, RuFUS WlLMOT, 115. 



Guardian Angel, The, 237. 

GuiNEY, Louise I. (gi^nee), 313. 

Habberton, John, 316. 

-Hail Columbia, 43. 

Hale, Edward Everett, 243-4, 

242, 251, 295, 2^6. 
Hale in the Bush, 43. 
Hallam, Henry (1777-1859), 70. 
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 94-97, 54, 

98, 254. 
Hamilton, Alexander, 42. 
Hardy, Arthur Sherburne, 316. 

Hardy, Thomas, (1840 ), 295. 

''Harland, Marion," see Ter- 

hune. 
Harper's Magazine, 250, 251, 296. 
Harris, Joel Chandler, 319, 

302. 
Harris, William T., 324. 
Harte, Francis Bret, 279-281, 

294, 295, 296, 302, 304. 
Hasty Pudding, 44. 
Hawthonre, Julian, 316, 135. 
Hawthonre, Nathaniel, 129-146, 

39, 54, 60, 61, 63, 84, 111, 117, 

126, 153-155, 158, 163, 172, 191, 

192, 193, 196, 204, 221, 233, 239, 

260, 268, 294, 295, 304. 
Hay, John, 314, 285. 
Hayne, Paul H., 270-272. 
Hearn, Lafcadio, 325. 
Hebe, 223. 

Henry, Patrick, 39, 40. 
Herrick, Robert. (1591-1674), 287. 
Herrick, Robert, 321. 

Hewlett, Maurice (1861 ), 143. 

Hiawatha (he a wah^ tha), 197, 

198, 146. 
HiGGiNsoN, Thomas W^., 243-4, 

154, 192, 251, 296, 300. 
Hildreth, Richard, 187. 
Hoffmann (1776-1822), 118. 
Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 249-50, 

251, 296. 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 230- 

241,54, 130, 136, 160, 162, 190, 

192, 211, 212, 215, 220, 221, 225, 

243, 249, 250, 267, 278, 292, 294, 
295. 



INDEX 



359 



Homer (b. c. about 1000), 40, 45, 

54, 89, 93, 105, 231, 247, 253, 

258, 279. 
HoPKiNsoN, Francis, 44. 
HoPKiNsoN, Joseph, 43. 
Horace (b. c. 65-8), 239, 284. 
House of the Seven Gables, 131, 135, 

138, i39, 145. 
HovEY, RicHAKD (huv'y), 312, 

291, 292. 
Howard, Blanche Willis, 318. 
Howard, Bronson, 306. 
Howe, Julia Ward, 243. 
Howells, William Dean, 296-298, 

252, 277, 288, 294, 299, 302. 
Huckleberry Finn, 278. 
Humble Romance, A, 300. 
HuTTON, Laurence, 326. 
Hymn to the Night, 200. 
Hymns of the Marshes, 274. 
Hyperion, 192. 

Ibsen (1828 ), 297. 

Ichabod {ik' a hod), 209, 182, 214. 
Idle Man, The, 97. 
Indian Burying Ground, The, 47. 
Innocents Abroad, Til, 278. 
Inscription for the Entrance to a 

Wood, 106. 
'-Irving, Washington, 64-77, 54, 

55, 61, 62, 63, 84, 98, 100, 107, 
111, 141, 187, 188, 191, 200,203, 
223, 248, 251, 264, 278. 

Israfel, 113, 124, 125. 

Jackson, Helen Fiske, 282-284, 

296. 
James, Henry, 298, 299, 294. 
James, William, 306. 
Janvier, Thomas, 317. 
Jay, John, 42. 
Jefferson, Thomas, 40, 41, 42, 

101, 183. 
Jeffrey, Richard (1773-1850), 69. 
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 318, 300. 
John March, Southerner, 303. 
Johnson, Samuel, (1709-1784), 

40, 100. 
Johnston, Mary, 320. 
Johnston, Richard Malcolm, 319, 

302. 



Jordan, David Starr, 325. 

JuDD, Sylvester, 129. 

Kalevala, The, 197. 

Kant (1724-1804), 151. 

Keats, John (1795-1821), 105, 205. 

Kennedy, John P., 63, 84, 114, 

118, 127. 
Kentucky Cardinal, A, 304. 
Key, Francis Scott, 99. 
King, Captain Charles, 320. 
King, Grace, 320. 
Kingsley, Charles (1819-1875), 

129. 
Kinney, Coates, 248. 
Kipling, Rudyard(1865 ), 119, 

280, 295. 
Knickerbocker History, 66, 54, 75. 
Knickerbocker Magazine, 98, 193. 
Lady or the Tiger, The, 301. 
Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 19, 

30, 229. 
Lamplighter, The, 146. 
Lampman, Archibald, 315. 
Landor, Walter Savage (1775- 

1864), 158, 247. 
Lanier, Sidney (la neer''), 272- 

275, 271. 
Larcom, Lucy, 243. 
Last Leaf, The, 233, 238, 240. 
Last of the Mohicans, 81, 85, 86, 89. 
Lathrop, Rose HawTHORNE, 135, 

172. 
Laus Deo, 209. 
Lazarus, Emma, 312. 
Lea, Henry Charles, 322, 305. 
Leather Stocking Tales, 85, 89. 
Leaves of Grass, 255, 258-264. 
Leland, Charles Godfrey, 327. 
Liberator, The, 206. 
Life of Columbus, 70. 
Life of Washington, 74, 75. 
Ligeia, 122. 
Lincoln, Abraham, 184-5, 181, 

197, 222, 230, 248, 250, 260, 262, 

264. 
Lines on a Bust of Dante, 243. 
Little Beach Bird", The, 97. 
Little Boy Blue, 285. 
Little Giffen of Tennessee, 271. 



360 



INDEX 



Locke, David Hoss, 327, 
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 323. 
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 
190-204. 28. 54, 117, 126, 130, 
131, 132, 133, 136, 141, 146, 163, 
205, 212-214, 216, 217, 221, 224, 
230, 233. 238, 239, 240, 245, 
247, 260, 263, 271, 287, 292. 

Lost Occasion, The, 182. 

LouNSBURY*, Thomas E., 324. 

Loveu-eWs Fight, 43. 

Lowell, James Russell, 215-230, 
54, 83, 129, 130, 132, 13H, 154, 
160, 173, 175, 190, 192, 213, 214, 
232-239, 242, 249-251, 252, 262, 
264, 267, 278, 287, 290, 292. 

Luck of Roaring Camp, 279. 

Lucretius (b. c. 95-52), 165. 

LuMMis, Charles F. (lum^is), 
325. 

Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 326, 
291 307 

Macaulay,* Thomas B., (1800- 
1859), 117, 188, 227. 

M'Fingal, 43. 

Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831), 
68. 

Mc^Iaster, John Bach, 323, 305, 

Madison, James, 42. 

Magaalia Christi Americana, 27. 

Mahan, Captain Alfred T. , 322, 
305. 

Mandeville, Sir John ( 14th cen- 
tury), 246. 

Man Without a Country, The, 
244. 

Man With the Hoe, The, 285. 

Manzoni (1785-1873), 60. 

Marble Faun, The, 135, 138, 145. 

Marco Bozzaris, 96. 

Marcus Aurehus (121-180), 179. 

Margaret, 129. 

Marguerite, 210, 214. 

Marjorie Daw, 288. 

Markham, Edwin, 314, 285. 

M.YRSH, Geo. P., 190. 

"M.VRVEL, Ik." See D. G. Mit- 
chell. 

Masque of the Red Death, 122. 



Mather, Cotton, 27-29, 37, 55, 

157, 158. 
IMather, Increase, 27, 28. 
ISIather, Richard, 27. 
Mathews, Brander, 317. 
Mayo, "William Starbuck, 128. 
Melville, Herman, 128. 
Memories of President Lincoln, 25G, 
262. 

Meredith, George (1828 ), 

294. 
jNIifflin, Lloy'd, 311. 
Miller, Cincinnatus H. ("Joa- 
quin"), 281, 282. 
INIiLLER, Olive Thorne, 325. 
Milton, John (1608-1674), 17, 23, 

202. 
IMiTCHELL, Donald Grant, 243-4, 
Mitchell, Silas Weir, 316. 
Mitchell, Samuel Latham, 65. 
Mohy Dick, 128. 
Modern Instance, A, 297. 
Montaigne (1533-1592), 179. 
MooDY', William Vaughn, 315. 
Moore, Clement C, 99. 
Moore, Thomas (1779-1852), 70, 

95, 201. 
Morris, George P., 99, 98, 248, 

254. 
Mosses From an Old Manse, 134, 

137, 
Motley', John Lothrop, 188, 221, 

237. 
MouLTON, Louise Chandler, 312, 

289. 
MS. Found in a Bottle, 114, 119. 
MuiR, John, 325. 
MuLFORD, Elisha, 324. 
IMuRFREE, Mary N., 319, 302. 
Murray", Lindley', 53. 
3Iy Life is Like the Summer Rose, 

99, 
3f>/ Lost Youth, 191, 202. 
My Study Windoivs, 222, 227-229, 
"Nasby', Petroletoi V." See 

Locke. 
Nation, The, 296, 
National Era, 147, 208. 
Nature, 159, 233. 



INDEX 



361 



Neal, John, 61. 

Nearer Home, 248. 

Negro Melodies, 248. 

Newcomb, Simon, 306. 

New England Nun, A, 300. 

Neiu England Primer, 19,25, 231. 

Newman, John Henry (1801-1890), 

164. 
New York Evening Post, 104. 
New York Home Journal, 98. 
New York Mirror. 98, 124, 254. 
North American Pevieiv, 93, 102, 

221 222. 
Norton, Charles Eliot, 242-3, 

222, 224, 247. 
O'Brien, Fitz- James, 316. 
Captain, My Captain, 258, 262. 
Old Creole Days, 303. 
Old Folks at Home, 248. 
Old Ironsidesy 232, 240. 
Old Oaken Bucket, 99. 
Omar Khayyam (d. 1123), 165. 
Onioo, ]28. 
On a Certain Condescension in 

Foreigners, 222, 223, 228. 
O'Reilly, John Boyle, 311. 
Ossian (about 3d century), 253, 

258. 
OssoLi, Margaret Fuller (oe^so 

li), 155, 134, 153, 154, 221. 
Otis, James, 39, 40. 
Outcasts of Poker Flat, 281. 
Outlook, The, 291. 
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock- 
ing, 263. 
Overland Monthly, 279. 
Page, Thomas Nelson, 319, 302. 
Paine, Thomas, 41, 208. 
Palfrey, John G. (pawKfri), 

187. 
Pan in Wall Street, 290. 
Parker, Gilbert, 321. 
Parker, Theodore, 150, 152- 

154. 
Parkman, Francis, 188-9, 267. 
Parsons, Thomas W., 242-3, 247. 
Parton, James, 187. 
Party and Patronage, 251. 
Pastoral Letter, The, 208, 214. 



Pater, Walter (1839-1894), 126. 
Paulding, James K., 62, 54, 63, 

65, 77, 98 
Payne, John Howard, 99, 245 

248. 
Peck, Samuel Mi n turn, 313. 
Percival, James G. , 99. 
Perkins, William Rufus, 314. 
Petrarch (1304-1374), 76, 229. 
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, see 

Ward. 
Phillips, Wendell, 185-6, 162, 

219, 250, 251. 
Piatt, John James, 313, 285, 

296. 
Piatt, Sarah M. B., 315, 285. 
PiERPONT, John, 94. 
Pilot, The, 87, 81. 

PiNKNEY, EdW^ARD C, 99. 

Pioneers, The, 78, 81, 85, 86. 
Plain Language from Truthful 

James, 279. 
Plato (b. c. 429-347), 54, 89, 151, 

168, 179. 
Plutarch (50-120?), 100. 
PoE, Edgar Allan, 112-127, 47, 

54, 60, 63, 98, 111, 130, 131, 141, 

142, 143, 191, 200, 201, 203, 221, 

224, 230, 23 ^>, 244, 248, 254, 263, 

268, 270, 272, 274, 294, 295. 
Poet at the Breakfast Table, 231, 

236. 
Poets of America, 290. 
Poor Richard's Almanac, 33. 
Poor Voter on Election Dav, 210. 
Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 17, 

231. 
Prescott, William Hickling, 

188, 71, 74, 127. 
Present Crisis, The, 217. 
Prince, Thomas, 22. 
Prince of Parthia,2i. ' 
Professor at the Breakfast Table, 

236. 
Prophecy, A, 46. 
Prue and 1, 250. 
Psalm of Life, 193, 194. 
Purloined Letter, The, 119. 
Questions of Life, 211. 



362 



INDEX 



Rabelais (14S3-1553). 27S. 
Radcliffe, Ann (1754-1823), .'8. 
Rain upon the Roof, The, 248. 
Ealeigh, Walter (of University of 

Glasgow), 229. 
Ramona, 284. 

Raven, The, 115, 118, 124, 125. 
Read, Thomas Buchaxax, 244-5, 

247. 
Realf, Richard (Ralph), 313, 285, 
Reese, Lizette W., 313. 
Reply to Hayne, 182. 
Repplier, Agxes, 327. 
Reveries of a Bachelor, 244. 
Rhodes, James Fokd, 323, 305. 
RiCHAEDSox, Charles F., 32i, 6. 
RiDPATH, John Clark, 323. 
Riley, James Whitcomb, 314, 

285. 
Riplet, George, 153-4, 133, 163, 

2i9. 
iii.se of Silas Lapham, 297. 
Rives, Amelie (reevzl, see 

Troi^etskoy. 
Roberts, Charles G. D., 315, 306. 
Roe, Edward P., 316. 
Rollo Books, 147. 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 323. 
Rossetti, William M.( 1829— ), 256. 

ROWSEN, SUSANXA, 56, 61. 
ROYCE, JOSIAH, 306. 

Rodder Granqe, 301. 

Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 229. 

Rya!v, Abram J.. 313. 

Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), 37. 

Salmagundi Papers, 65, 62. 

Saxtayaxa, George, 312. 

Saturday Visitor, 114. 

Saxe, JohnG., 243. 

Scarlet Letter, The, 134, 138, 143, 

145. 
Schiller (1759-1805), 201. 
Schouler, James (skoo^ler), 322, 

305. 

SCOLLARD, ClIXTOX, 312. 

Scott, Dcxcax C, 316. 

Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 47, 

60-71 passim, 86-95 passim, 107, 

202, 205, 253, 277, 294. 



Scrihner's Monthly, 249. 
Sedgwick, Catharine ^I., 61, 77. 
Seton-Thompson, Ernest E., 326, 

308. 
Seventh of March Speech, 182, 109. 
Sewell, Samuel, 22. 
Shakespeare, William( 1564-1616), 

21, 24, 54, 100, 203, 205, 222, 

253,254. 
Shaler, Nathaniel S., 306. 
Shellev, Percv Bvsshel 1792-1822), 

56, 58, 105,' 220. 
Sherman, Frank D.. 312. 
Sidnev, Sir Philip (1554-15S6), 17, 

194.' 
Sill. Edward Rowland, 282, 283. 
SiMMS, William Gilmore, 127, 84, 

270, 271, 301. 
Simple Cobbler of Agawam, 26. 
SMch Book, The, 69, 54,75,76,191. 
Shipper Treson's Ride, 210. 
Smith, F. Hopkinson, 319, 301. 
Smith, Goldwin, 322, 305. 
Smith, Capt.ain John, 19-21, 111. 
Smith, Samtel F., 243, 231, 238. 
Smoke. 178. 
Smollett, Tobias George (1721- 

1771), 87. 
Snou-Bound, 204, 212, 213, 241, 

249. 
Snow Image, The, 132, 135, 142. 
Song of the Camp, 247. 
Songs of the Sierras, 281. 
Southern Literarij Messenger, 114. 
Southev, Robert (1774-1843), 99, 

102. ' 
Spanish Student, The, 196. 
Sparks, Jared, 187. 
Specimen Days, 257. 
Spenser, Edmund (1552-1599), 17, 

105, 117, 141, 216. 
Spofford, H.arriet Prescott, 318, 

289. 
Spy, The, 84, 54, 80, 82. 
Stanton, Frank L., 313. 
Star -Spangled. Banner, 99. 
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 289 

290, 6, 125, 166, 228, 241, 247, 
^^252, 272, 287, 296 307. 



INDEX 



363 



Sterne, Laurence (1713-176S), 67. 
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850- 

1894), 92, 121, 173, 307. 
Stockton, Frank R., 300, 301. 
Stoddard, Charles W., 314. 
Stoddard, Richard Henry, 247-8, 

98, 109, 244, 287, 289. 
Story, William W., 242. 
Story of a Bad Boy, 288. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 146- 

148, 209, 250, 284, 294, 300. 
Strachey, William, 21. 
Stuart, Ruth McEnery, 319. 
Sumner, Charles, 185-6, 192, 207. 
Swallow Barn, 63. 
Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 67, 

278. 
Swinburne, Algernon C. (1837- 

), 227, 229, 256, 274. 

Symonds, John Addington (1840- 

1893), 256. 
Symphony, The, 274. 
Tabb, John B., 313. 
Tales of a Traveller, 70. 
Tales of a Wayside Inn, 199. 
Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- 
besque, 115. 
Taylor, Bayard, 245-247, 6, 98, 

162, 242, 244, 248, 267, 273, 277, 

287, 289, 296. 
Tenney, Tabitha, 56, 61. 
Tennyson, Alfred (1809-1892) 105, 

106, 117, 200, 201, 203, 226, 230, 

263, 274. 
Tenth Muse, The, 23, 230. 
Tent on the Beach, 212. 
Terhune, Mary Virginia, 302. 
Thackeray, William M. (1811- 

1863), 63, 88, 90, 92, 294. 
Thanatopsis, 102, 54, 93, 107, 109, 

283. 
"Thanet, Octave," see French. 
Thaxter, Celia, 312, 289. 
Thomas, Edith M., 312. 
Thompson, Daniel Pierce, 84. 
Thompson, Maurice, 325, 308. 
Thoreau, Henry David (tlio^ro), 

168-179, 130, 134, 153-155, 163, 

215, 229, 241, 257, 291, 308. 



Threnody, 166, 225. 

Thwing, Charles Franklin, 

306. 
TicKNOR, Francis 0., 271. 
TiCKNOR, George, 189 190, 216. 
Timothy Titcomb Letters, 24; ». 
TiMROD, Henry, 270-272, 273, 

274. 
To a Honeybee, 48. 
To a Waterfowl, 103, 107. 

Tolstoi (1828 ), 297. 

ToRREY, Bradford, 325. 
Tourgee, Albion W. (toor zhay''), 

319. 
Troubetskoy, Princess Amelie, 

320. 
Trumbull, John, 43, 44. 
Turgenieff (1818-1883', 297. 
"Twain, Mark," i-ee Clemens. 
Twice-Told Tales, 133, 134, 137, 

233. 
Two Years Before the Mast, 128, 

157, 189. 
Tyler, Moses Coit, 323, 6, 41, 

305. 
Tyler, Royall, 25. 
Typee, 128. 
Ulalume, 115, 125. 
Uncle Remus, 302. 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 147, 284. 
Van Dyke, Henry, 326, 307. 
Venus of Milo, The, 283. 
Vergil (B. c. 70-19), 45, 93, 155, 

247. 

Verne (1828 ), 119. 

Very, Jones, 155, 153. 

Victorian Poets, 290. 

Views Afoot, 245. 

Village Blacksmith, The, 195. 

Vision of Sir Launfal, The, 219, 

220, 225, 175, 263. 
Voiceless, The, 240. 
Voices of the Night, 193, 233. 
Voltaire (1694-1778), 3^, 187. 
Volunteer Boi/s, The, 49. 
VoN Holst, Herman E., 323, 305. 
Waiting by the Gate, 106. 
Walden, 171, 173-176, 178. 
Walker, Francis A., 324, 306. 



S64 



INDEX 



Wallace, Lewis, 320. 
Walpole, Horace (1717-1797), 58. 
Walton, Izaak (1593-1683), 179. 
"Ward, Artemus," see Browne. 
AVard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 

318, 300. 
Ward, Nathaniel, 26. 
Ware, William, 129. 
Warner, Charles Dudley. 251, 

249, 252, 288, 296. 
Washington, George, 40, 32, 187. 
Webster, Daniel, 181-183, 40, 

84, 130, 184, 209, 254, 268, 271. 
Webster, Noah, 53, 56. 
Week on the Concord and Merri- 

mac Rivers, 171, 177. 
Wendell, Barrett,324, 6, 7,220,305 
Wharton, Edith, 318. 
Whipple, Edwin P., 190. 
White, Andrew Dickson, 322. 
White, Gilbert (1720-1793), 179. 
White, Henrv Kirke (1785-1806), 

102. 
White, Richard Grant, 190. 
Whitefield, George (1714-1 770), 30. 
Whitman, Walt, 252-264, 108, 

242, 267, 269, 276, 277, 291. 
Whitney, Mrs. A. D. T., 317. 
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 204- 

214, 22, 54, 79, 130, 136, 182, 

215, 216, 219, 224, 230, 233, 238, 
241, 242, 249, 250, 252, 257, 260. 



Wieland, 57, 59. - 
WiGGiN, Kate Douglas, 318. 
Wigglesworth, IMiciiael, 23. 
AViLcox, Ella Wheeler, 315. 
Wilde, Eichard Henry, 99, 

270. 
Wild Honeysuckle, The, 47, 93. 
WiLKiNS, Mary E., 299, 300. 
Williams, Roger, 25, 26. 
William Wilson, 121, 112. 
Willis, Nathaniel P., 98, 124, 

178, 179, 220, 245, 248, 287. 
WiLLsoN, Forceythe, 271. 
Wilson, Woodrow, 323, 305. 
WiNSOR, Justin, 322, 305. 
AViNTER, William, 326. 
Winthrop, Theodore, 316, 84. 
Woodberry, George E., 311, 113, 

291, 307. 
Woodnotes, 166. 

AVooDwoRTH, Samuel, 99, 248. 
AVooLMAN, John, 30. 
AA^ooLsoN, Constance Fenimore, 

321, 304. 
AA^ords worth, AA^illiam (1770- 

1850), 100, 107, 158, 261. 
Wreck of the Hesperus, 195. 
Yankee Doodle, 42. 
Yemassee, The, 127. 
Youth'' s Companion, 98. 
Zenohla, 129. 



Sept 28 1901 



w, ^ P •- • 



